After submitting designs to NASA in the fall, UA’s Rocket Girls, an all-female team of engineering students, were selected to compete against 30 teams in a national competition. The competition, called the NASA University Student Launch Initiative, was held Saturday in Huntsville, Ala. To qualify, the team needed to submit a proposal, a preliminary design report, a critical design report and a flight readiness review to the NASA USLI team. Kelly Cannon, safety officer for the team, said the teams still have to process the data that their payloads collected and submit their final results, so they don’t know the overall winners of the competition yet.
Although competition results have yet to be decided, Cannon said some peer and technical awards were given out already.
“We won the technical award for educational engagement, which was ‘awarded to the team that is determined to have best inspired the study of rocketry and other science-, technology-, engineering- and math-related topics in their community,’” she said, quoting the award description, which may be viewed at web.mit.edu.
“‘This team not only presented a high number of activities to a large number of people but also delivered quality activities to a wide range of audiences,’” Cannon said.
Team member Marquise Ridlehuber said being a member of Rocket Girls could potentially help her with her career because it is something she wants to do for the rest of her life.
“Being on the team allowed me to get hands-on experience with a high-powered rocket, work with the motor, parachutes and build the actual structure of the rocket,” she said. “We had mishaps and successes that allowed us, as a team, to come together and work to solve problems that none of us had faced before, especially because no one on the team had any experience with high power rocketry before. Overall, Rocket Girls has been a wonderful experience full of learning and helped me realize that I do want to work in rocketry.”
Melissa Hembree, payload team leader, said her team was responsible for the experiment part of the rocket, which was, basically, the components that fit inside the rocket that measured the pressure, acceleration and height, among other things.
“Being on the Rocket Girls team this year has given me a chance to design a payload and then discover all of the reasons why our design doesn’t work,” she said. “However, the troubleshooting and the problem solving that I have practiced by constructing our design and changing our design to fit with the rocket are exactly what I’ll deal with as an engineer. Overcoming all of the issues that our team encountered and still meeting our deadline, the rocket launch, was an experience that has helped prepare me to become a real world engineer.”
The Rocket Girls are advised by John Baker, professor of mechanical engineering; Beth Todd, associate professor of mechanical engineering; Paul Hubner, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and mechanics and Amy Lang, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and mechanics.
