Ingraham High students set for rocket launch in Alabama

On Sunday, 10 Ingraham High School students will spend the day trying to launch their 10-foot-long rocket a mile high into the Alabama sky, along with 13 other high-school rocketry teams from around the country.

The middle-school and high-school teams are participating in NASA's Student Launch Initiative. The Ingraham students qualified for the event in Toney, Ala., when their team finished seventh among a field of 100 at the Team America Rocketry Challenge in Virginia this past year.

The Ingraham team shipped the $2,000 rocket and its accompanying homemade parachute to Alabama last week.

The Alabama event isn't a competition, but Ingraham senior and rocketry club president Nat Mote said he's still excited.

"We love watching fire," he said. "Even when things go wrong, it's entertaining. There's always that flare aspect."

Mote says he's pulled an all-nighter and a few late nights for the sake of the team's rocket.

The team has worked since September — sometimes sacrificing lunch and working after school — to design and build the rocket. They submitted three reports, 123 pages in total, to NASA, which also critiqued the rocket design through video conferences.

The students struggled when National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers first critiqued them this past winter. They hadn't shared their progress with each other and couldn't answer NASA's questions.

"It's been kind of tough," said Patrick Ma, an Ingraham senior and the project manager. "We were unprepared for the level NASA expected. We kind of went back and redid everything."

The 10 students began to work together, and their teamwork prepared them for another grilling from NASA.

"They have absolutely knocked the socks off the NASA engineers," said Carl Hamilton, the team's National Association of Rocketry mentor.

Peter Schurke, an Ingraham science teacher who has led the rocketry program for four years, said the real value in the NASA event isn't about launching a rocket a mile high. It's about teamwork and leadership.

"If you've got engineering skills, you can become an engineer," he said. "If you've got engineering skills and you can communicate well, you can have any job you want at NASA."

The team's rockets are in Schurke's rocket lab, which is really a few lab stations in the corner of his science classroom. Rockets and rocket parts litter the desks. Standing upright in the corner is a plastic tube that looks like a yellow crayon. One of Schurke's students calls it a "rocket-in-waiting."

Schurke started the rocket program at Ingraham four years ago. He enjoyed building rockets as a kid, and he offered the program to students after he received a flier about a rocket contest.

A half-dozen students joined the program during the first year. They didn't quite make it to nationals, but each subsequent team has competed nationally.

Now Schurke advises an official rocketry club in rocket construction and safety. The program has become more popular each year.

"It just sort of seems to have exploded," Schurke said. "Now we have 40 kids who are confirmed rocket geeks and proud of it."

Students, however, disavowed the "geek" label, writing in their school newspaper that they preferred "educated pyromaniacs." They'll indulge that pyromaniac side at the launch Sunday.

Their rocket event won't quite match a NASA space-shuttle launch, but the team says it'll still be something to see and hear:

"It's like a miniature roar," said sophomore Teri Hunter. "What you see from NASA, picture that, but 10 times smaller."

Andrew Doughman: 206-464-3195 or adoughman@seattletimes.com