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Date: 04/07/2006

Subject: Southwest Middle School

Eighth-graders seek the sky
By Kari Lucin, staff writer
Alberta Lea Tribune (Southern Minnesota and Northern Iowa)
Saturday, April 1, 2006 5:34 PM CST
http://www.albertleatribune.com/articles/2006/04/02/news/news4.txt

Four students from Southwest Middle School participated in the Team America Rocketry Challenge this year, creating and launching a model rocket.

Eighth-graders Mitchell Wood, Lauren Klick, Brian Reindl and Mitch Jones started building their neon pink rocket in December. It contains two parachutes and a piston that ensures the parachutes don't catch fire, as well as padding for the egg that goes inside. For a rocket flight to be considered successful, the egg can't be broken.

The team launched the rocket six times last week, and the egg has been broken only once in all the test flights, when the students used a too-powerful motor.

"With our last rocket, we used to big of an engine," Wood said. "The bottom of it blew up."

Students stay 30 to 40 feet away from the rocket as it launches.

The SWMS group has experimented with three different rockets. The current model is made of heavy cardboard, balsa wood, copper and plastic, along with lots and lots of glue. The total cost of the project was $166, and Mitchell Wood's dad Richard bought the materials and donated them to the school. Richard also supervises the launches.

Most of the kids have launched rockets or seen similar mechanisms in use before.

"My cousin's potato cannon is cast-iron and uses propane in it," Wood recalled. "When it hits a tree, there's nothing left of a potato. If it's a small tree, there's nothing left of the tree."

About 750 teams of high school and middle school students compete in the Rocketry Challenge nationwide, for grand prizes totaling $60,000 in cash and savings bonds.

"If our rocket goes bad, we're going to say 'April fools,'" Klick said.

Fifteen students originally signed up for the project, but only four stayed.

"Everybody thinks we're science geeks, but we're not," Klick said.

"No, we're just geeks," joked Mitchell.

(Contact Kari Lucin at kari.lucin@albertleatribune.com or 379-3444.)

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