The BrookX Rocketry Team Pursues New Heights
By Joshua Kim
Dr. Liu, a new STEM teacher at The Stony Brook School, and Roger Zhou, a co-captain and Chief Engineer Officer of the BrookX Rocketry Team, stand outside of Hollis. It’s Saturday, and it’s quiet; most students are either home or in their dorms. “Okay, okay,” says Dr. Liu as he signals to the members of the team to begin to unload the materials from the cart that they used to bring over the materials from the STEM lab. Led by junior Sebastian Guadalupe-Peña, they quickly set up the stand for the rocket and load it on before clearing the area.
Dr. Liu begins counting down: “Three, two, one…” He presses the launch button. Nothing happens. The team members look unfazed, even bored; they’re used to this. They circle around and tinker with some of the machinery. “Three, two, one…” Nothing again. “Okay, if nothing happens again, we will go back to the lab,” announces Dr. Liu. One final adjustment, one final countdown. “Three, two, one…” Whoosh! The rocket is off!
Since September of last year, the sound and sight of rockets being shot off on campus have caught the attention of students at the Stony Brook School. But where did those rockets come from? Last September, Dr. Liu, along with interested students in the pre-existing Robotics Team and Engineering, Innovation, and Design (EID) class, started the rocketry team, recently rebranded as the BrookX Rocketry Team.
Before coming to SBS, Dr. Liu had been a teacher at Western High School in Davie, Florida, where he founded the “Imagine the Impossible” STEM Academy, which included not only Rocketry and Robotics teams but also Solar Car Challenge and Biotech research programs. Bringing that expertise in STEM education to SBS, he hoped to help meet student interest in STEM programs here.
For the students involved, being part of the team has been in equal measures exciting and exhausting. Because the team is not recognized as an official club or sport (although they will be available as a sports credit beginning next spring,) members regularly found themselves working after dinner or having to negotiate with their coaches to attend events with the rocketry team. In addition, over the course of the year, the ten-member team has traveled over one thousand miles, often traveling from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on their weekends to test their rockets in Connecticut or upstate.
BrookX’s hard work and long hours paid off on April 17, when they found out that they had landed themselves among the top hundred rocketry teams in the nation, the only one at Long Island and one of seven in New York, gaining them a spot at the Finals for the American Rocketry Challenge (ARC) on May 18 in Washington D.C., the goal they had been aiming toward the entire school year.
For the “American Rocketry Challenge,” a program sponsored by the likes of NASA, the Department of Defense, and aerospace companies like RTX and BAE, the team had to design a rocket that would fly for exactly 43 to 46 seconds, hit 820 feet high, and come back down in one piece, all while carrying a raw egg. When they go to the finals in Washington, they will be doing the same thing with two different altitudes, 850 and 800 feet.
Captain David Zhang described the year as “bumpy” and expressed frustration about some of the stagnation the team had experienced in recent months as well as the big time commitment being part of the team required, though he was overall happy with being part of the team, saying that he got to “feel involved in his passion” and develop his “leadership skills,” as well as being excited to head to D.C. for the finals.
“Rocketry is a wonderful application of physics, math, even chemistry,” said Dr. Liu. “A lot of the math and science [you] learn in class can be applied to rocketry design. Rocketry is a platform that allows you to see the real-world application beyond learning a ton of equations and basic facts. Now you have to put everything together, make things work.”
Going forward, Dr. Liu expressed hopes of landing within the top 25 teams in the nation, which would qualify BrookX for the Student Launch Challenge (SLC), where they would design, build high-powered rockets and compete with other high school and university teams at the NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In addition, he hoped to make the team more diverse and inclusive, particularly in regards to gender and ethnicity, where there is still, as in many STEM programs, an underrepresentation of different groups. In particular, he stated that he hoped that there would also be an all-female rocketry team in the future.
For students interested in rocketry, Dr. Liu recommended joining the “Engineering, Innovation, and Design” class next year, where students will work with returning rocketry members to hopefully begin launching rockets by September to prepare for next year’s competition