CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia USA — Crouched at the ignition switch a few feet from a towering 7-foot-tall Mirage model rocket, Ben Sargeant, 19, turned to the crowd.

“Alright, all systems are go!” Sargeant yelled out. He gave a thumb’s up.

The 60 rocket fans in the outfield of Piedmont Virginia Community College’s softball diamond held their breath.

They counted down.

Three. Two. One.

Lift off.

Whoooooosh.

The jet-black rocket - packed with a powerful F engine - arched 400 feet over the onlookers’ heads into the bright blue sky.

Sadly, the Mirage’s twin parachutes failed to deploy. It crash-landed into the college’s nearby soccer field, leaving a 7-inch-deep impact crater and splintered apart the $110 rocket.

“Oh, the humanity!” cried Jon Hexter, a math professor at PVCC, as he ran to survey the damage.

The gaggle of rocketry enthusiasts gathered Saturday to watch PVCC’s engineering club celebrate the end of the semester by firing model rockets into the sky.

Sargeant, leader of the club’s rocketry project and a third year engineering student at PVCC, said he hopes to eventually work as a flight director on NASA’s missions to Mars and the Moon.

“I want to be an aerospace engineer, so this is right up my alley,” he said.

Many of the onlookers Saturday were students from Jack Jouett Middle School.

“I started playing with rockets when I was 9, so this gives me a chance to have some fun and maybe inspire some others,” Sargeant said.

Robby Arthur, a 13-year-old Jack Jouett student, was given the chance to fire off an Aim-120 AMRAAM model rocket, a scale replica of an air-to-air missile.

“It’s so cool,” Arthur said. “It’s like a cool scientific project. I like when the rockets go really high.”

Another engineering club member, Patrick Schwab, 19, has been interested in rocketry ever since his parents bought him an X-Wing Fighter model rocket seven years ago.

When he launched the X-Wing, however, one of its two engines malfunctioned. It crashed into a car parked nearby.

“That got me curious about how rockets work,” Schwab said. “Ever since, I’ve been interested in this sort of thing.”

Saturday’s rocket festivities were originally slated to take place near Shadwell at Milton Field, which is owned by the University of Virginia. Club members relocated the event to PVCC after they learned they lacked permission from UVa to launch rockets off its property. “We had some logistical snafus,” Sargeant said.

Though the club’s marquee rocket was busted Saturday on its inaugural flight, Sargeant was not dismayed.

“I just love rockets,” he said. “This has given me a chance to fly a few that are a little bigger.”

Hexter said the club will analyze in the spring semester why the Mirage malfunctioned.

“If nothing ever goes wrong, then you never learn anything,” he said.

Copyright © 2006, The Daily Progress