Rocketry Planet

ROCKFORD, Illinois USA — Seven students from Jefferson High School will compete in the National Fly-Off May 19 in The Plains, Va., near Washington.

The Fly-Off is sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association, trade association for the U.S. aerospace industry; and the National Association of Rocketry, the nation’s nonprofit educational organization for hobby rocket consumers.

Other contest partners include NASA, the Department of Defense and numerous aerospace companies.
 
This event, called the Team America Rocketry Challenge, is the largest model rocket contest; it has involved more than 7,000 secondary-school students on 690 teams from schools in 48 states.

The 100 best of 690 rocketry teams from around the U.S. have been invited to travel and bring their rockets to compete in the final fly-off for selecting the national winners.

Representing Jefferson are seniors Sean Leider and Andrew Kieser, juniors Ryan Morand, Michaela Frossard and Samuel Villarreal, and freshmen Anthony Boose III and Jonathan Dunaway. Leider is the team’s captain. Dallas Turner, a physics teacher at Jefferson, is the coach.

The contest required that students design, build and test a model rocket that can fly for as close to 45 seconds total flight duration and 850 feet maximum flight altitude as possible with a payload of one raw egg, and successfully parachute the egg back to the ground unbroken. The top 10 teams will share a prize pool of $60,000 in savings bonds and cash.

This is the fifth year of the competition and the third year in a row that a team from Jefferson has attended the National Fly-Off. Both previous years, Jefferson placed in the top 25. This year’s goal is to place in the top 10.

Woodward has sponsored the team from Jefferson each year of the competition.
 
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