CONTEST EMAIL ARCHIVES

Date: 05/09/2006

Subject: San Lorenzo rocket team aims for national prize

Rocket team aims for national prize
High schoolers hoping 'Spirit of San Lorenzo' will blast past the competition and land softly in Virginia
By Katy Murphy, STAFF WRITER
Oroville Mercury Register
http://www.orovillemr.com/news/bayarea/ci_3801235

SAN LORENZO - The idea of going to school an hour early every morning to design a contest-winning rocket might sound like punishment to many teenagers. But there is nothing that San Lorenzo High students Sammy Murray, Abigail Torres and Jose Ramil Seneris would rather do.

Their small but devoted club, called PenSLz - People's Engineering of San Lorenzo - has just put the finishing touches on a rocket that will soon compete against hundreds of other egg-toting projectiles made of expandable foam, fins and sandpaper.

The team makes its first trip to Virginia next week for the May 20 Team America Rocketry Challenge in The Plains, Va. The winning rocket nets a $60,000 prize.

"I really like science. I like rockets," said Torres, a freshman who dreams of floating in space as an astronaut.

But the three members of PenSLz are hardly singleminded in their interests. If it were not for their slew of after-school commitments, the group might be able to meet at a more reasonable hour than 7 a.m.

Torres plays in the orchestra. Murray takes ballet, tap and tumbling classes. And the group's adviser, science teacher Aaron Vanderwerff, jokes that Seneris aspires to be a Renaissance man as well as an aerospace engineer. The junior plays football in the fall and takes part in the school play each spring.

The PenSLz team - which started with 15 students in the fall - spent about three or four months designing its device using a software program called SpaceCAD. They began by making small "kit rockets" and then built larger models until they were satisfied.

Precision, not just power, is critical to the project. The winning rocket will reach a maximum height of 800 feet (as measured by an altimeter planted inside), stay aloft for 45 seconds and glide slowly to the ground without breaking the raw egg inside. That means, of course, that its parachute must open properly.

"With this rocket, we're always worried about, 'Is it going to open?'" Seneris said.

At the group's test run April 9, the rocket fell 25 feet short of 800 feet. The team made some alterations before the second try, but it still needed a few yards, Vanderwerff said.

The team has teasingly named most of its trial runs after the adviser - Vanderwerff5, 6, etc. - but the final version of the rocket will have a different name: Spirit of San Lorenzo.

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