About a dozen students of all grade levels huddled around a table in the engineering room on Sept. 8, using popsicle sticks and small paper cups to introduce themselves to rocketry concepts. At another table, seniors Jessica Wang and Ivy Qian examined a simulated rocket on their laptop as they discussed its center of gravity.
Senior Katherine Lu relaunched the school’s Rocketry Club in the fall of 2017 after it was discontinued in 2015. Since then, club members have designed rockets and attended rocket launches. Last year, the team was able to qualify for the Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) national competition in Manassas, Va., for the first time. Although the team did not advance far in the competition, Lu said she was content with their progress and aims to not only qualify for nationals again this year but also to go beyond competitions and further develop club members’ interests in rocketry.
Club beginnings
Lu said she brought back the club because of her own interest in and prior experience with rocketry.
“My brother’s in Boy Scouts, so I’ve done rockets with him,” Lu said. “I wanted to start the club because those were only kit rockets, and I wanted to design my own. When I heard that my cousin had a rocketry team, I was thinking, ‘I can do that too.’”
To build a rocket, the team starts with a simple design — a long tube for the rocket’s body along with fins and a nose cone. The next step is to gather parts for the rocket by either 3D printing them or, more commonly, buying them from specialized rocketry websites. The team then uses a simulator called OpenRocket to set the dimensions of the rocket to the sizes of the parts that they have. If the rocket does not turn out as planned, the simulator lets the team test modifications to the rocket, like adding more weight or changing the fin shape.
Initially, the entire rocket creation process took the team around five weeks to complete, but now, they are able to build a rocket in one night if necessary, Lu said.
To test their rocket and compete against other teams in the area, club members attend launches. Lu said that launches take up entire Saturdays and occur twice a month on average. They occur throughout the school year, and the official TARC launch to qualify for the national competition is in early April.
Most of the launches are organized by the Livermore Unit National Association of Rocketry (LUNAR), and Saratoga’s team usually competes against schools such as Homestead, Gunn and Lynbrook.
Due to rain throughout the majority of last year’s season, the team was not able to attend as many launches as they originally planned.
“We can’t launch when it’s raining, and we can’t launch when it's too dry and there's a chance of fire,” Lu said. “This year, it still depends on the weather, but we’ll try to go to every launch we can.”
Launches are governed by a certain set of criteria. The goal for each rocket is to reach an altitude of exactly 800 feet, land after 40 to 43 seconds and carry a raw egg up and down without cracking. For each foot above 800 feet, a point is added to the team’s score, and for each second over 43 seconds, four points are added. If the egg is damaged in any way, the team is disqualified.
The ultimate objective is to have the lowest score possible, and in April, the top 100 teams out of around 850 from the TARC qualifying launch are invited to the TARC national competition. The rules at nationals are slightly different from those at the qualifying launch.
Although the team failed to advance past the first round of flights at nationals last year, Lu said that the team met her expectations.
“We didn’t do well in general, but it was good considering how much experience we had,” she said.
The team scored a four on their qualifying flight but a 68.88 in their first round at nationals. Lu attributes this discrepancy in scores to the difference in climate and humidity on the East Coast as well as the team’s lack of data points due to the few launches that they had in the fall. They also did not have a chance to run any test flights before their official launch at nationals.
Recent growth
The team meets on Sundays at 5 p.m. in the engineering room under the supervision of their mentor Reed Kingston, who is a parent volunteer for robotics but harbors a hobby for rocketry. Lu also hosts occasional lunch meetings in the room of their official club adviser, physics and business teacher Kirk Davis.
At the Rocketry’s Club informational meeting on Sept. 8 in the engineering room, Lu was pleasantly surprised by the “promising” number of newcomers. Whereas the entire club consisted of about seven active members and worked on one set design last year, Lu said the club may need to split into three or four groups and build separate rockets this year. At the informational meeting, there were approximately 25 students.
Kingston, the rocketry team’s mentor, said that it was the largest group that had ever turned up to the introductory meeting. He said the core team last year only consisted of about seven people, who were mostly the same people as the ones who re-founded the club.
“It started off as a fun activity that a group of friends wanted to do together,” Kingston said. “As they got more serious and more skilled, the activity became equally important as just doing it with their friends.”
For the club’s first year, Kingston played the role of a teacher, introducing the club members to the basics of rocketry. But over time, the task of teaching has shifted to the student leaders of the club, allowing Kingston to become more of a mentor and adviser than a coach to the students.
Kingston also helps the team obtain parts for their rockets. The club members buy the parts while Kingston physically gets the parts from the sellers, but because parts can cost up to $80, the team tries to recycle pieces such as motors as much as possible.
Junior Isaiah Chung, the club’s vice president, joined the club last year. He said rocketry provides more hands-on learning than many other clubs do and that it focuses on teamwork and efficiency.
“It’s a really good experience to be in,” Chung said. “People will know how much fun it is when they join. I had so much fun last year as a sophomore.”
Despite the relaxed atmosphere of the Rocketry Club, Kingston emphasized that members must consider the responsibilities that they are taking on by flying powerful rockets and that they must prioritize safety before anything else.
“With great power comes great responsibility and a heck of a lot of fun,” Kingston said.