The engineers worked hurriedly under deadline. They had a set window of time within which to launch their rockets. With limited resources, they needed to build vehicles that were not only aerodynamic, but lightweight enough to achieve maximum altitude.

Lest you think this is a scene from NASA history, this took place not at Cape Canaveral, but in Room 401 of Chimacum Middle School on Oct. 5. Arthur Bednar, outreach education coordinator with the Museum of Flight in Seattle, was gently scolding sixth- and seventh-grade students who had wasted their duct tape on purposes other than attaching fins and nose cones to their soda-bottle rockets.

“You don’t get more tape,” Bednar said, shaking his head, reinforcing the idea that real-life rocket scientists must wisely conserve their resources.

This marked Bednar’s second visit to Chimacum, after the Museum of Flight had brought its inflatable planetarium dome to the high school this spring. The planetarium was along on this return visit as well, this time to the gym at the middle school, but Bednar was redirecting his focus from the fundamentals of astrophysics to the practical applications of spacecraft.

“This spring, we used the planetarium to talk about how the stars and galaxies coalesce, and the basic formation of the universe,” Bednar said. “Today, I’m coming at these kids from an engineering standpoint, putting them through the challenges of designing rockets, after learning [the rockets’] history.”

This history lesson placed a special emphasis on the Saturn V three-stage, liquid-fueled, expendable rocket, used by NASA from 1969 to 1973 to support the Apollo program’s human exploration of the moon.

ROCKET STUDENTS

While the rockets launched by Chimacum Middle School students Oct. 5 were single-stage projectiles made out of construction paper, duct tape and 2-liter soda bottles, they nonetheless employed their own version of liquid fuel – in this case, ordinary tap water pressurized by air pumped in through bicycle tire pumps.

“If they pour too much water in, they have to pump that much more air in to get it to launch,” Bednar said. “By breaking the rocket design down into its components, and comparing them to the parts of an arrow, the goal is to get kids to see why each part is added. You need fins and a nose cone to stabilize a rocket in flight, but if the kids use too much tape to attach them, it adds enough weight to make them tumble from the sky.”

At the same time that Bednar was imparting these hands-on lessons on rocketry, fellow museum educator Theda Nguyen was doing the same with rover space vehicles, guiding eighth-grade students through building their own exploratory robots after noting how ubiquitous such technology has become in modern society, from Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners to video drones.

“[Theda] pointed out that ATMs are robots, which I don’t think had occurred to these kids before,” said Dan Nieuwsma of the Boeing Bluebills, who estimated the group had kicked in $1,000 to fund the museum personnel’s visit, with the museum itself securing a matching grant of $1,000 through a program that provides support to students receiving free and reduced-price lunches.

Nieuwsma continued: “This one boy in the planetarium was speaking up so much that I thought he must have known just about everything, but his teacher told me that he’s usually very quiet.”

“We want to spark a reaction in these kids,” Bednar said. “There’s a limit to how much we can teach them in 50 minutes, but by awakening their interest in these subjects, they might sign up for new classes, or join science clubs, or go to museums. The point is that they’ll want to learn more.”

Nieuwsma noted that the Bluebills are trying to arrange for similar educational visits by the Museum of Flight to the Quilcene School District and the Hoh Tribe.

Interested in learning more?

Museum of Flight outreach coordinator Arthur Bednar invites anyone interested in arranging an on-site educational session of their own to contact him at 206-768-7175 or abednar@museumofflight.org.