AMORY, Mississippi USA – The countdown is on at the Monroe County Advanced Learning Center. Honors physics students are launching eggs – and hoping they land safely – in an effort to qualify for a national rocket competition next spring.

It’s the Team America Rocketry Challenge, or TARC for short, instructor Ester Potts said.

“Last year, there was a total of $60,000 in prizes at the national flyoff in Washington, D.C.,” Potts noted.

So far, the ALC’s team is the only one from Mississippi registered for the event, billed by the National Association of Rocketry as “the largest model rocket showcase on the planet.” Potts’ 13 students have until April 7 to conduct their qualifying launch before the May 17 competition, which is limited to 100 teams.

The project is paid for with business sponsorships, including one solicited from Beijing.

According to the six-year-old contest’s official Web site, www.aia-aerospace.org/tarc, this year’s challenge is to design, build and fly a model rocket carrying two raw eggs and return them safely to the ground while staying aloft “for exactly 45 seconds and reaching an altitude of 750 feet.”

“We’ve launched rockets just about every week since we’ve started” in August, said Smithville senior Katie Myhand, who attends the ALC with students from Hamilton and Hatley highs. With 250 students, mostly upperclassmen, the ALC offers advanced or specialized courses not available at Monroe County’s individual high school campuses.

For the rocket project, “We’re not allowed to buy a kit,” Myhand noted. “We have to do it ourselves.”

Delicate assignment
It’s the job of payload specialists Stefan Tribble, a junior from Hamilton, and Matthew Cao, a Chinese exchange student who’s a senior at Hatley, to figure out how to prevent the eggs from cracking. “We came up with the design to make the egg holder out of sponges,” Stefan said, noting they’ve also had good results with florist foam. Until Oct. 19, they hadn’t lost a single egg.

In the latest practice run, the team attempted to launch three rockets. The first had a blackpowder engine ignited by four AA batteries and shot to about 350 feet, but its parachute malfunctioned. The second rocket misfired, and the third, with a composite engine ignited by a 12-volt battery, soared skyward before the eggs plummeted – sans parachute – to the ground.

“The design was sound. It went up high enough,” Smithville senior Talon Holloway said as he inspected the resulting mess. “It probably went around 750 feet.”

They’ll never know for certain – the onboard altimeter was rendered useless in the crash – but the rocketeers will keep trying.

“We have a pretty good chance if we tweak it a bit,” Stefan said.

Copyright © 2007, Daily Journal.