A new club meets every Friday to design model rockets, bringing an interesting challenge as well as an engineering opportunity to U-High students.
The American Rocketry Challenge is the world’s largest rocket contest, according to its website, with nearly 5,000 students from middle and high schools all over the country designing and constructing model rockets built to ensure both a large amount of lift and the safe landing of an egg contained inside of the rockets.
Senior Jackson Skelly brought the club to U-High.
“I enjoy rocketry and the engineering components, designing rockets to meet specific criteria, and doing that in a collaborative environment, instead of by myself,” Jackson said.
Jackson said the club members are already in the process of creating designs for their rockets, using a free software program called OpenRocket to design their rockets and simulate flights.
Once these test launches are completed, the data collected will be used to build prototypes and tweak the propulsion, weight and balance of the rocket as necessary. These final rocket designs will be launched toward the end of this school year and compete against more than 1,000 other teams across the country.
