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Thursday's Internet Edition, May 12, 2005.
Laguna Creek High rocketry team wins national competition
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The Laguna Creek High School Rocketry Team at the competition’s launch
site in Manchester, Tennessee. Pictured left to right are: Nic Groves,
Edmund Yu, David Tam, Quang Tran, Alison Tan, Allen Dang, Dallas
Humber, advisor Eric Johnson, and Danny Lee. Photo courtesy of NASA.
The awards plaques that NASA officials gave Laguna Creek High’s
rocketry team for winning the NASA Student Launch Initiative. Team
sponsor Aerojet funded their project and visit to Huntsville.
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By Cameron Macdonald
Citizen Staff Writer
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Laguna Creek High’s Rocketry Team encountered a midnight surprise at
their hotel. They realized that the wiring for the rocket that they
labored on for nine months after school and in their advisor, Eric
Johnson’s garage, had been damaged during the flight from California to
Alabama.
The team had to launch their rocket to reach one mile in the air
for a national NASA competition the next morning. They traveled to the
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. to face eight other
high school finalists from across the country to fire rockets at least
a mile above the earth.
Teammate Danny Lee had to solder the rocket’s loosened wires back
into place in a bathroom until 3 a.m. to avoid activating the fire
alarm with his smoke.
On April 23, the team drove to a sod farm near Manchester, Tenn.
to fire their foot rocket in the cold wind with their members hunched
over a laptop to collect data caught by the rocket about the sun’s
energy.
“That was fun,” teammate David Tam said. “It was 10 o’clock, 20
miles-per-hour wind, about 50 degrees, and you’re huddled over this
little laptop to run more simulations and figure out what the actual
data is going to be.”
They launched “Blackbird,” and although it missed the
competition’s goal of reaching exactly one mile by 38 feet, the rocket
still went the highest that day.
They are now the national champions in the NASA Student Launch
Initiative competition for high school students. Under Johnson’s
advisory, Laguna Creek High’s rocketry teams spent the past two years
climbing the ranks in various national rocket competitions and getting
challenged with higher altitude goals.
Just like any aerospace engineers, this school year’s team
underwent a rigorous series of project proposals to NASA, design
reviews, formal presentations, trial-and-error experimentation and many
long working hours. Several of these students look forward to competing
again next year.
“Being first in the nation in a competition affiliated with NASA
is going to be at the top of their (college) resumes,” Johnson said.
The team came home Sunday night and gathered in Johnson’s
classroom after-school the next day, some of them still wearing their
NASA nametags.
The 2004-05 rocketry team formed last fall with sophomore through
senior students, all Advanced Placement Physics students with Johnson.
Lee said that his teammates knew very little about rocketry
before joining and that much of their intricate work was self-taught.
Nonetheless, the team’s fascination with rocketry took them to
the point where they did most of the project’s work without his help.
“It’s fun to just sit back and watch them work on the rocket and not have to be in there,” he said.
Johnson also teaches an independent study course on rocket
construction to student teachers at the University of California, San
Diego.
The members are David Tam, Danny Lee, Nic Groves, Edmund Yu,
Quang Tran, Alison Tan, Allen Dang and Dallas Humber. Each member took
a specific position in the team ranging from coordinating the rocket’s
experiment to its parachute landing.
Johnson explained that the Laguna Creek High rocketry teams
boosted their school’s ranking through a series of competitions within
the Team America Rocketry Challenge. The team was then chosen as a
finalist for the NASA Student Launch Initiative (STI) during this
school year.
Dawn Mercer, an education specialist at the Marshall Flight
Center, said that all STI participants undergo the same project review
process as NASA engineers.
“It’s very intimidating when you first see it, but they weren’t
intimidated,” she said. Mercer added that the Laguna Creek High team’s
thorough, detailed reports are what are also expected from her agency’s
contractors.
Last September, the team submitted their required project proposal
to NASA that included their work plan, budget, the materials they will
use, their construction procedure and even the environmental laws and
FAA regulations they will obey. Subsequent reports were design and
flight readiness reviews.
They brainstormed several ideas for rocket experiments, ranging
from measuring oxygen and carbon dioxide levels to testing the effects
of high rocket speeds on ant passengers.
Other teams’ experiments at the STI competition included a study of rocket speed on live cricket chirps.
The team then chose an experiment where they would connect sensors
to their rocket that would measure the intensities of the sun’s solar
and ultraviolet rays, where they predicted that such energies would
naturally increase as the rocket travels further from the earth. They
also had to build a pressure system that released the rocket’s
parachute from a specific altitude to ensure a safe landing.
Over the months, the team tested their rocket on the Laguna Creek
High campus, along with test-firing it under their mentor, Steve
Kendall’s watch, at a park in Livermore and a cattle ranch east of
Stockton.
Kendall, vice president of Livermore’s branch of the National
Association of Rocketry, gave construction advice and prepared their
rocket engine, along with reviewing their designs and pointing out
shortcomings on their project, as every SLI team is required to be
mentored by an expert.
Kendall said that firing a rocket to reach an exact mile is
challenge that most of his own club members cannot reach as factors
like weather and motor conditions affect the chances.
He shared his amazement on the team’s progress.
“They went from being under-qualified flyers in a few months to the best in the nation,” Kendall said.
Johnson said the project funding drew from $2500 provided by NASA
and $1500 from Aerojet. He added that the company also flew, housed,
fed and invited his students to an exclusive tour of the Sci-Quest
Science Center in Huntsville.
The team concocted a rocket from a pre-made body, motor and fuel
tank with the aid of software, expert advice and self-instruction. The
final product is painted black with grey fins and is emblazoned with
the AeroJet logo, “Blackbird” and a smiley face sticker. The fuel is a
solid jet propulsion fuel, which was contained in a metal cylinder that
simply slides into the rocket and gets ignited by a wire. Using
software, the rocket was determined to travel up to 780 feet per
second.
The team also had to build a circuit board from scratch to
prevent too much voltage from overloading their experiment’s solar
receptors. Team members agreed that getting the payload was the most
painstaking to accomplish.
The team members laughed when Tam recalled a testing accident with the rocket’s data collector.
“A few beeps and a puff of smoke came out,” he said.
During the competition’s process, the team had to submit follow-up
project reports, along with discussing their work with NASA rocket
experts through live teleconference cameras at the school district
office. They now must submit their final report with their experiment’s
data analysis.
Tam said that the preliminary data from the launch currently
looks positive as Lee mentioned that it looks like their theory of
solar radiation increasing as the rocket moves toward the sky. However,
they mentioned that the thick clouds that day might impact their data.
Before the lunch, the team toured the Marshall Flight Center and
connected with NASA officials like Mercer and Sam Ortega, the lead
engineer on the space shuttle’s rocket boosters.
Johnson said that such connections will pay off in the future, were his students decide to pursue careers in the rocketry.
Mercer said that such interest in rocketry is important for
building the future aerospace workforce, as President George Bush
envisions a manned flight to Mars.
Some of the team members said that they look forward to joining
the rocket competition next year and are already considering
experiments like collecting air samples from more than a mile in the
air or possibly a study of animals traveling in rockets.
“Now that we know what we’re doing, at least it should be
easier,” Tam quipped. “We’ll see what we can put in the rocket legally
without having animal cruelty laws put on us.”
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