Local students reach for the stars in Rocket Science Class
Students in Calvin Best’s Rocket Science and Space Flight History class at Breckenridge High School demonstrated their aerospace engineering skills last Thursday during a rocket launch event at the Stephens County Airport.
Breckenridge High School teacher Calvin Best helps a student make final adjustments to a rocket before launching in on Thursday, May 15, at the Stephens County Airport. (Photo by Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan)
The class has built and flown four different rocket projects this semester, combining hands-on building with theoretical knowledge of physics and space history.
“It’s really supposed to be an exploratory class that’s also fun,” Best said. “You’re trying to teach the kids some basic rocket science. Things like … force is equal to mass times acceleration. How does gravity work? Velocity, momentum, all these kinds of topics.”
In the class, students learn rocket design principles including center of pressure, center of gravity, and flight vectors. They also perform thrust time curve analysis to predict flight performance using software called Open Rocket.
“We make them do all the predictive flight values … like, this motor configuration is supposed to give you this amount of height,” Best explained.
The program combines practical building skills with theoretical knowledge. Students learn to work with various materials and adhesives to build sturdy rockets.
“For example, you take … balsa fins, but you’ll trim them in basswood to make them a lot stronger, where you have to use different glues for that … epoxy resins, five-minute epoxy, cyanoacrylate or Super Glue,” Best said. “They’ve gotten the hang of that.”
Thursday’s launch was particularly successful, with students achieving approximately 25 perfect flights in a row.
“This is an extremely good group of kids. They’re really good builders, too,” Best said. “At today’s launch, they had about 25 perfect flights in a row. That’s unusually good.”
Students in Calvin Best’s rocket science class at Breckenridge High School launch a rocket last week. Click here to see more photos from the launch. (Photo by Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan)
For next year’s class, he plans to incorporate more advanced technology, including electronic payload bays with altimeters that detect apogee through pressure changes to deploy parachutes automatically. That will help prevent lost rockets and make recovery easier.
“We’re going to go with electronic payload bays, so that we don’t care about apogee so much,” Best explained. “Like, if it’s at 2,000 feet or something, the altimeter that’s on board, due the pressure changes, will know when it’s apogee, and it’ll blow out the ejection charge. And then you’ll have a small shoot, like a drogue, and then it’ll fall to about 500 feet. And then your main chute will come out, which will keep you from having to walk so far, possibly lose all your… good, hard work.”
The class also covers space flight history, studying Mercury-Redstone and Gemini-Titan missions, along with Apollo moon landings, while keeping up with current space developments.
Best said the class provides valuable career preparation in a growing field and at least a couple of the students are interested in aerospace engineering.
“It’s kind of a renaissance going on with SpaceX and all these different companies that are on the private side,” he said. “There are probably going to be a lot of cool things down the next … 20 plus years, so there are some things for them to think about that are exciting.”
Best also acknowledged the collaboration with Jason Reeves, a physics teacher who specializes in drones and advanced 3D printing — skills they hope to integrate into the program in the future. Reeves taught at BHS but has been at Wiley High School for the past few years and usually brings some of his students to the rocket launches; however, the Wiley students couldn’t attend on Thursday.
“I’ve met some really cool kids from Wiley, and that’s nice to have a good buddy who’s just as into this,” Best said.
Click here to see the Breckenridge Texan’s Photo Gallery from the rocket launch.
Students set up rockets on launch rails at the Stephens County Airport as they prepare a multi-rocket launch last week. (Photo by Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan)
Cutline, top photo: In their final rocket launch of the semester, Breckenridge High School rocket science students successfully launched about 25 rockets in a row at the Stephens County Airport on May 15. (Photo by Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan)
