Learning to launch

Sam Donoho, a sophomore at St. Thomas High School, competes with the school’s Rocketry Team. Here he is at the NASA launch site.

When I was visiting high schools, I was indecisive because they all seemed similar. However, I remembered the Rocketry Team at St. Thomas High School, and that tipped the scales in favor of St. Thomas. The idea of a club in which students build and launch model rockets greatly interested me.

As long as I can remember, I have loved building things and have had an interest in engineering. Rocketry was no different. Dr. Edward Marintsch, who organized the team, was kind to those who wanted to try rocketry as freshmen. He didn’t expect us to have experience, and most of us didn’t. I later learned that the building of rockets must be carefully evaluated and precise. We built rockets to meet certain height and time requirements in order to qualify for the national competition the Team America Rocketry Challenge, where teams compete for a cash prize in Washington D.C.

We spent months designing and testing possible launches of the rocket on a computer, and we later built our rocket to the exact specifications to which we had set our goal. As the team prepared, I wondered where we were going to launch. I learned that, because of the space needed and official submission of our results, we needed to drive to NASA and launch in its field. I was overjoyed at the thought of this because it sounded very official – as if I were a “rocket man” partaking in the space program.

When we went to launch, we needed to get advance security clearance and present a photo ID. The launch went well, but I did have to walk half a mile through a swampy field to retrieve it. We ended up launching three times in one trip to achieve the results we wanted, and we did well compared to another team’s rocket that exploded next to me.

As if that weren’t enough, we were also able to go into a warehouse and see Saturn V, the rocket that launched astronauts to the moon.

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