CMCA Students Partner with NASA

Cheyenne Mountain Charter Academy ( CMCA) has a group of middle school and high school students who just returned from the most incredible experience of their lives. NASA's Student Launch Initiative is one of the rewards offered to teams who place among the top 20 at Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) national finals. The CMCA students placed fifth at TARC last spring, so they submitted a proposal that was accepted by NASA. Nine months and hundreds of hours later, they launched a science experiment nearly a mile into the clear blue Alabama sky on top of a beautiful, nine foot tall, 14 pound rocket using a huge motor that is powered by the same propellant NASA will use in the upcoming Ares replacement for the Shuttle.

At Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville (home of Space Camp), the CMCA students had tours of some of NASA's leading edge research facilities. They got to watch as physics engineers tested a rocket motor in which plasma (the stuff of the sun) is contained and shaped by an electromagnetic field. They were able to hold parts of the alloy shell of the upcoming Ares vehicle and examine the revolutionary "stir welding" process that will make its skin incredibly strong. Among many other things in their packed schedule, they also got to speak with a Russian scientist about a mockup of the space station designed to help ground-based technicians provide accurate maintenance instructions to those in space, and they got to spend a significant amount of time inside the mockup.

The project made CMCA an official vendor for NASA, and the school was one of only 11 in the entire nation to gain entry into the program. For a web page featuring the team's activities, click here.

Kenneth is the SLI team captain and an 8th grader at CMCA; his eyes blaze as he talks about the trip, "It's hard to pick, but I thought the coolest thing was the test stand tour. A few years ago, they actually lit up Saturn V motors mounted to these things. The stands are so huge they're hard to comprehend. When they lit the first Saturn V motors, they shattered windows up to 20 miles away. Please, I wanna push that red button."

SLI teaches middle and high school students to design, build and test reusable rockets with scientific payloads. This unique hands-on experience allows students to demonstrate proof-of-concept for their designs and gives previously abstract concepts tangibility. It's like putting wheels on a car and really energetic gas in the tank and setting teens free.

The CMCA experiment is an instrumentation test: the altimeters used in TARC and SLI give variable readings from one unit to the next, and the students were curious about the accuracy of the altimeters. An HD video recorder and a GPS unit were onboard with the altimeters. A comparison between the three instruments will allow the team to determine exactly how accurate the altimeters are. The team is putting the science and math they've been learning in class to practical use building and flying the rocket and analyzing the data from their experiment. They designed and flew a full-sized rocket in Rocksim (an engineering and simulation program) and built a scaled-down prototype vehicle to test stability and performance before building their final rocket.

The team's data analyst is still sifting through the results, but it looks like the rocket flew to around 4,000 feet and did a tail slide. In a tail slide, the rocket does not arc over, it actually comes to a complete stop while still pointing up, then starts coming back down tail first. While the team hoped for such a result, they did not expect it, because the odds against a tail slide are around 300 to 1, even with careful effort to precisely fly the rocket straight up. Another extremely promising aspect of the final flight is it appears the rocket did not progress any further than ten feet away from the pad horizontally in any direction. As a result, the data will be easier to interpret. Nate, the team's data analyst, said, "We expected to have to do precise static tests to determine the effects of perspective, and we also expected to have to apply the Pythagorean Theorum to triangulate the actual altitude, but that won't be necessary. It certainly makes my job a lot more fun."

Adelaide is on the recovery, outreach, and sponsorship teams, "I had no idea how cool the Marshall Space Flight Center would be. There is an incredibly wide range of ongoing work, from metallurgy to waste recovery, robots, botany and propellant dynamics."

NASA provided considerable funding to get CMCA's ambitious project off the ground ( ATK, a large aerospace company provided this year's primary national support to NASA), but the team had to do a lot of fundraising such as popsicle sales, a special basketball game, a night at Mr. Biggs and pet photos with Santa.

The CMCA SLI team has received enthusiastic additional support locally from the Colorado Springs Rocket Society (COSROCS) and from many local businesses and individuals, including Thad Zylka, ITT, Cheyenne Mountain Charter Adademy/PTO, Boeing, Inc.; Colorado Springs Employee Community Fund, Brandango.us, Lockheed Martin, ASMDA, Alpha Hybrids, Dry Cleaning Equipment Services, Dr. Branon Johnson, GPS Flight, Inc., Black & White Auto, Print Net, and Colorado Aerospace Education Foundation. We also had two major contributors who wish to remain anonymous.

The student who commutes the farthest to participate in SLI is Tyler, "I attend The Classical Academy in North Colorado Springs, but I don't mind the trip South. I love building and flying high power rockets, and was in hog heaven watching and participating in 34 big multi-deployment launches a mile high." His eyes get really big, "The range of experiments covered by the other high school and university teams was amazing. I learned a lot."

Ex-NASA engineer and COSROCS education director Warren Layfield also got to go at the last minute. "In order to maximize our efficiency, we had four parents and mentors transport the SLI rocket to Alabama in a minivan. Wow, what a trip; 20 hours non-stop. I'm happy to endure a little discomfort, though, because these students are our future. Especially in a recession, we need to generously support these teens with our time, expertise and financial support."

The two main goals of NASA's education program are to "inspire and motivate students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics" by supporting education in the nation's schools and to "engage the public in shaping and sharing the experience of exploration and discovery" by supporting informal education and public outreach efforts. NASA's commitment to education places special emphasis on these goals by increasing elementary and secondary education participation in NASA projects; enhancing higher education capability in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, disciplines; increasing participation by underrepresented and underserved communities; expanding e-Education; and expanding NASA's participation with the informal education community. The Office of Education will continue to support NASA's strong historical role in education at all levels, with linkages to NASA research as a central focus.

These efforts will help create and sustain the scientific and engineering workforce of the future. In addition, the Office of Education will continue to emphasize sharing the results of NASA missions and research programs with wider audiences by using science discoveries and research applications as vehicles to improve teaching and learning at all levels.

Jacob is a COVA student, "My hero is Homer Hickam, who is the main character in the movie "October Sky." He also wrote the best selling book "Rocket Boys," as well as many others. At the SLI launch, I got to shake hands with and talk to Mr. Hickam, and he was the nicest person you could imagine. I expected rocket scientists to be aloof and maybe even pretentious, but I found out they're just like me. My dream of becoming a NASA engineer or private contractor fabrication specialist just got wings."