THE PLAINS, Va. – In its three-month odyssey of trial and error, the model
rocket code-named R.A.V.E.N. had its share of disasters.
After one launch, the rocket burst into flames like the mythical phoenix.
Another time, it crash-landed atop a frozen pond. And once, it nearly impaled
a camcorder-wielding man eager for a close-up of the action. Close-up indeed.
But those mishaps were all behind them yesterday as students from the
Applications & Research Laboratory High School in Ellicott City carted their
rocket through the rain onto Great Meadow, a 250-acre field in the Piedmont
countryside, to compete for a lucrative amateur engineering prize.
After days and nights of dreaming, designing, building and testing, 100
student teams from across the country had earned the chance to see if their
tubelike, finned creations could meet the challenge: soar to precisely 1,500
feet carrying a payload of two Grade A raw eggs, then parachute the delicate
cargo back to Earth – unscrambled.
The prize? Bragging rights and a slice of $59,000 to be split by the top
five teams.
Braving gusts of wind and lightning, the Ellicott City students set their
rocket up on a launch pole amid the mud-covered grass and rolling hills in
hopes that the craft could perform under pressure from Mother Nature.
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As they walked away from R.A.V.E.N. to prepare for blastoff, flight
engineer Kanwarpal Chandhok, 16, turned for one last glance and said to the
rocket, “I love you. Fly high, do good.”
Chandhok’s team was one of four from Maryland competing in the national
fly-off yesterday. At the end of the contest, one team had overshot its
target. One had fallen short. One had been disqualified when the rocket
malfunctioned. And one sailed to a perfect victory, finishing No. 1.
Unlike classic competitions such as the egg drop, in which students must
devise a way for the poultry version of a crash test dummy to survive a
40-foot plunge, or the building of a model bridge that can withstand hundreds
of pounds of pressure, this contest required a cross-section of skills.
“When you’re throwing an egg off a building, you basically have one thing
you have to work at – keep that cushioning,” said Kevin Johnson, adviser to
the Rocketry And Vertical ExploratioN team from Howard County.
“With this contest, you have to know mechanical engineering, math and
geometry to calculate the altitude, physics to understand how the eggs react
under thrust, and aerodynamics to make sure your rocket is going to be
stable,” Johnson said. “It’s an amalgamation of a lot of different skills.”
Sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National
Association of Rocketry, the Team America Rocketry Challenge is a
first-of-its- kind competition. It commemorates the 100th anniversary of the
Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, while aiming to get students
fired up about careers in aerospace.
More than 9,000 students on 873 teams registered last winter. The 100 teams
with qualifying heights closest to 1,500 feet advanced to the finals,
including the Ellicott City students, and three other Maryland teams: from
Perry Hall High in Baltimore County, Boonsboro High in Washington County and
Northern High in Calvert County.
Each team began to tackle the challenge last fall armed with the 350-page
Handbook of Model Rocketry, a miniature electronic altimeter, a copy of Sport
Rocketry magazine and the computer program RockSim which allowed them to test
the stability and trajectory of their airframe designs before cutting those
first pieces of balsa wood, cardboard tubes and foam – their primary building
materials.
From her home in Cincinnati, Amanda Wright Lane, 49, said her
great-granduncles, Orville and Wilbur Wright, would have been “absolutely
thrilled” with the hands-on learning approach of the contest.
“It’s something that is not just reading out of a textbook,” said Lane.
Besides, Orville Wright was an early member of the Aerospace Industries
Association. “They would have loved the idea of getting kids interested in
rocketry.”
Beyond insights into the complexities of rocket science, the Maryland teams
say they have also gained a keen understanding of the highs and lows the
bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, must have experienced as they labored to
invent one of the most revolutionary technologies of the 20th century: the
airplane.
“I realized how much pain they had every time their plane crashed,” said
Mickey Hummel, 17, a Northern High senior, who once watched his team’s rocket
fly up in a 30-foot arc, crash nose-first into the ground and burn out. “I can
relate to how they felt and how frustrated they were.”
“It’s really hard to make a rocket that can get to 1,500 feet,” said
seventh-grader Brett Rosenthal, 12, whose Boonsboro High team had rockets
vanish behind clouds, never to be found. “It’s got to be 100 times harder to
make an airplane fly.”
Early on, the students learned that clustering and simultaneously igniting
the rocket motors – short, cylindrical tubes filled with dry fuel, similar to
gunpowder – would be key to success.
But between driver’s education classes, student council meetings, school
plays and prom plans, the teams learned first about failure.
Many had no experience tinkering with rockets, and even those who did had
never encountered anything quite like the rocket challenge.
Meeting four hours a week, it took more than a month for the Ravens to
build their 22-inch-tall, red-and-white rocket. And on its first launch in
March, it broke apart and crashed offshore into a frozen Middletown Park pond.
They retrieved the altimeter using a remote-controlled toy car dispatched
onto the thin ice to push the yolk-soaked wreckage back to shore – all the
while making sure their team leader, Conn Dickson, 17, wasn’t contaminated.
His allergies to eggs are so severe that if he touches an egg, Dickson’s
hand would swell “like it was put on a hot stove,” he said.
Meanwhile, the three-member Boonsboro High team struggled with rockets that
displayed Houdini-like tendencies.
“You see them and then you don’t,” said 10th-grader Ameen Mirdamadi, 15,
who toiled in the basement of his home building rockets with his brother,
Kayvon, 13.
“I don’t know if they disappear into a cloud or what, but it had a 28-inch,
bright-orange parachute. How could you not see that? We walked around miles
searching.”
Similar difficulties tormented the Northern High team.
Their early prototypes kept exploding into balls of flames. But eventually
their designs evolved from a bulky, 480-gram rocket made out of a Pringles
potato chip can to a third generation craft: Black Max, a 370-gram,
2-foot-tall beauty with trapezoidal fins.
“The kids were discouraged, but we kept chanting our slogan: `We never
throw in the tau,'” said supervising physics teacher Jonathan Everett,
referring to a physics term the group used in their pun on a motivational
motto.
That’s just what the Perry Hall team was about to do March 16, the last day
to submit qualifying scores. They had redesigned the rocket only the night
before when they walked onto a field of dried mud at Philadelphia and
Industrial Park roads in White Marsh, for one last try.
After weeks of disappointments and several hundred dollars spent, they
hooked the igniters of their rocket to a car battery, hit the firing button
and stepped back as it streaked off the launch pad, a modified Black & Decker
workbench, “like a bat out of you-know-where,” said team adviser Glenn Davis
of Essex.
It was clear they had licked the crooked, corkscrew takeoff that had
repeatedly sent it flying like a wounded duck. And when they retrieved it, the
altimeter reported another surprise: one beep, followed by five more, and then
two long, consecutive beeps. Translation: The rocket had reached 1,500 feet,
on the dot.
The team let out screams of joy.
But the orange-and-black rocket that raised their spirits in March brought
them disappointment yesterday. It streaked into the air, painting the sky with
a white-vapor trail. The balsa-wood body, swollen by rain, failed to separate
into two pieces as required by contest rules. The team was disqualified.
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The glitch also caused the motors to char the lower section of the rocket
and crippled its assent to 750 feet.
“Smells like hotdogs,” said Andrew Dickinson, 17, as he picked up the
scorched remains.
Said teammate Brad Spatafore, 18: “I just want to go home.”
The Ravens did not fare much better. A motor on the R.A.V.E.N.
malfunctioned, and the rocket reached only 1,015 feet.
“Too bad for us,” team leader Dickson said. “It really cost us.”
Meanwhile, the Northern High team had the opposite problem. Its rocket,
Black Max, shot to 1,630 feet – 130 feet above its target.
Team member Bruce Watkins said he was “just glad it didn’t blow up.”
As their fellow Maryland squads packed up their gear, the team from
Boonsboro High School got ready for a television close-up. The team’s rocket –
a thin, sickly looking contraption covered in duct tape – flew to 1,500 feet,
clinching first place.
The three members of the Boonsboro team shared $14,000 in savings bonds for
their victory, plus $2,200 in cash for the school. The team from Washington
International School in Washington, D.C., finished second; Vail Christian High
School in Edwards, Colo., finished third; and Manlius-Pebble Hill High School
in Dewitt, N.Y., and Waccamaw High School in Pawleys Island S.C., tied for
fourth.
“It was just luck,” said Ameen Mirdamadi of the Boonsboro team.
“And prayer,” chimed in teammate Brett Rosenthal, moments before the team’s
CNN interview.
In the end, many of the students said the competition met its goal: Their
interest in aerospace engineering, and technical fields in general, is
blossoming.
Chandhok, the 16-year-old flight engineer for the R.A.V.E.N. rocket,
nurtures a dream of becoming an aeronautical engineer. Watkins, the Northern
High senior, plans on getting a college degree in mechanical engineering.
That’s all in the future, of course. Before the competition yesterday,
members of each Maryland team had their minds focused on finishing in the top
10, a goal they believed was possible with a little good fortune.
“You could have the best rocket, but you might not have the best rocket for
that day,” said Dickson, leader of the Ravens.