Madison West Rocketry Club’s “Team Martians” with the Bananabee, their Mars Ascent Vehicle rocket, near Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
West High School’s Rocketry Club was the only high school among 19 entrants in a NASA Mars Ascent Vehicle Challenge on April 16; The other 18 were crews from colleges and universities. And it’s safe to say that Madison’s team was the only one that raised money for its experiments and trip to the competition by raking leaves.
Nevertheless, the club nabbed second place, losing out only to Cornell University. Besides the honor, the West High students received $15,000. They’re proud and pleased, but they stress that they’ve always had other, less-recognized goals.
“Each and every student in the club cares only to learn more and be challenged more,” says Dongfang Bai, a senior in the club. “We don’t do what we do in order to receive public recognition or awards. We do it because it is fun.”
“I’ve had a lot of amazing experiences because of rocket club, but my favorite aspect of it has been the connections I’ve formed with others,” says Jason Allen, a junior.
West’s Rocketry Club began 13 years ago. It averages around 50 members year to year, roughly divided equally between girls and boys. Ten of them made the trip to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
“We work all year long,” says their coach, Christine Hager, a biology teacher at West. “During the school year the students meet three to four times a week during our peak season.”
NASA required teams to demonstrate an autonomous robotic system that could collect a 4-ounce simulated Mars sample, and then return, place and seal it in a rocket’s payload compartment. The robot system then had to erect and fire the rocket, reaching a height of one mile.
It’s real work that’s helpful to the space agency. “The Mars Ascent Vehicle prize is one element of the larger story of how technology will enable our future exploration,” says Dennis Andrucyk, NASA deputy associate administrator. “Citizen prize competitions allow NASA to bring diverse minds to the table to be a part of [the] space program.”
Not that it’s all countdowns, blast-offs and trophies. “We go through the full review cycle that NASA projects go through, with a preliminary design review, critical design review and flight readiness review,” notes senior Mathilda Harris.
“Each review is about 100 pages documenting our design, progress and testing,” she says. “Our project is actually what a real-world engineering project is like, and that’s a really powerful experience to have as a high-schooler.”
Hager agrees: “That aspect — knowing your project well, documenting your project well and communicating your project to experts in the field — is a skill that’s really hard to teach unless you have real-world experience and [can] model that intensity in the classroom.”
Most of the teams’ rockets are 10 feet long. West’s is less than five. “At our Flight Readiness Review, we brought our rocket, and our review board thought it was a half-scale model because it’s so small,” says Harris. Having such a small vehicle allows the robotic autonomous ground support equipment (AGSE) to also be small. “The size of our AGSE affects our score, so having a small rocket helped.”
Despite their nationally recognized expertise, the work of the West Rocketry Club did include one notable miscue.
“Our rocket is named the Bananabee because it was originally made of yellow and black fiberglass,” says Harris. The team had never seen yellow fiberglass before.
“We were debating if it would be the Banana Slug or the Bumblebee,” she says. “At one of our launches I got them mixed up and called it the Bananabee, and the name stuck.”
