SHREWSBURY – It’s a bird! It’s a plane!
Actually, if you’re near 64 Holden St. on Monday afternoons, chances are you’ve just seen the launch of one of the Shrewsbury High School Engineering Club’s rockets.
The roughly 20 members of the club meet weekly to share their love of engineering with one another. The club first began in 2010, and, after a brief hiatus, now has a vibrant community of potential engineers, including many freshmen. Students lead meetings and coordinate activities.
Meetings feature engineering competitions between club members. In one meeting, students were challenged with building the sturdiest popsicle stick bridge, while at other meetings, students sought to construct a throwing plane that could carry the most weight.
However, the Engineering Club has recently focused on one particular challenge: rockets.
The club started utilizing leftover parts from previous years — tubing and fins, for instance — to construct makeshift rockets. Before long, the group was making bottle rockets, which use air pressure to get off the ground.
The group also purchased some prebuilt rockets. Engineering Club President Krish Jain said that launching rockets involves lots of trial and error.
“We bought a prebuilt rocket,” Jain told the Community Advocate. “We launched that one, but the parachute was too strong and the wind carried it away.”
The more the club launched rockets, the better the members got, and the group now looks to reach new heights by entering The American Rocketry Challenge. Sponsored by companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and NASA, the event challenges more than 5,000 students nationwide to design, build, and launch a model rocket according to certain specifications.
The event is quite the engineering challenge; this past year, rockets had to “carry one raw egg to an altitude of 850 feet, stay airborne for 42-45 seconds, and return the rocket to the ground safely with the egg intact.”
“It’s a team competition — It’s really awesome,” club adviser and science and engineering teacher Paul Wood said.
Wood isn’t allowed to share his expertise during the competition. “It’s all on the students — which is perfect — it’s all about them,” he said.
“It’s an interesting competition because you can’t just have the biggest engine,” Jain said. “If you have a big engine, sure, it will go up fast, but it will pass the height. If you add weight to slow it down, the rocket may get top heavy and tip over and we’ll still lose — or it will make it to the height and come down too fast.”
The club is now ready to enter the rocket engineering big leagues.
“The whole reason I wanted to start the club back up again was just because of the rockets,” Jain said. “It seemed like a really good thing — a fun competition to enter… I still remember the day we launched our first rocket; it was so satisfying seeing it go straight up.”
Getting to competition
The Engineering Club — like many others throughout the nation – hopes to register and participate in the regional events with an eye toward qualifying for the national competition.
Unlike more established rocketry programs at other schools, Shrewsbury’s team is looking for support to get off the ground. Many materials needed for rocket building — like tubing — are inexpensive, but each rocket uses pricey single-use engines.
Practice makes perfect in rocketry, and the club seeks to do as many test flights as possible before the competition. The group will use several engines throughout the process.
The group also needs to purchase rocket modeling software, parachutes, and needs funds for the competition’s costly registration fee.
“Right now, we want to improve Shrewsbury High School’s image,” Trung Nguyen, the club’s vice president and publicity coordinator, said. “We hope that next year we can have a team and have more resources available to us, [so] we can, in some way, hopefully gain some accomplishments in [the] upcoming competition.”
The club believes rocketry is an exciting opportunity for students interested in engineering.
For this club to “take off,” community support and sponsors are needed. The group mentioned how sponsors and donors would have their name or logo added to the group’s T-shirt and rocket.
Please contact [email protected] for more information.
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