Students gain hands-on engineering experience at Louisville Rocketry

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Some Louisville-area middle- and high-school students are taking science and engineering to new heights.

"We call ourselves Louisville Rocketry," explained Richard Liang, a sophomore at Manual High School. "That's our team name."

The team builds and launches rockets, but not just for fun. They compete.

"Our rocketry team has competed in the American Rocketry Challenge, which is the nation's largest rocketry challenge for middle- and high-school students," Liang said. "We also emphasize outreach programs, and we also do in-school activities."

As a young person, Himanish Lingamaneni, a Manual High School sophomore, said space exploration is the future -- and he wants to get a foot in the door.

"We're still in an age where launching rockets and space travel is, like, taking off," he said. "And working on the basis for that idea is what interested me the most about this program."

Jake Rydberg, an 8th grader at Meyzeek Middle School, said rocketry is not just for the high-schoolers.

"I love science," he said. "I also love rockets. They're cool. And I like watching something, just, fly."

"It's cool to see something that we have made go so high," added Vallabh Ramesh, also an 8th grader at Meyzeek Middle School. "And you know just, like, spending time with our teammates is also pretty cool as well."

"I think, like, as a spectator it's really cool," Liang said. "But like, when you're the one launching the rocket, if it goes well, it's really just a sense of joy."

But it's not all about the fun of pushing the launch button. Team members work to achieve certain specific goals.

"To qualify for nationals, we have to hit a precise altitude of 835 feet carrying two eggs inside the rocket, and we must recover them safely from when it's launched to when it lands," Liang said. "The top 100 teams move on to nationals in Washington D.C."

And the ultimate goal? Higher education.

"You get scholarship money as a prize," Rydberg said. "We want to get that. We all want to go to college. We all have high goals for engineering."

Benjamin Schumacher, a sophomore at Manual High School, said model rocketry has propelled his interest in STEM education.

"I guess I'm kind of into engineering -- like, mechanical engineering -- and this just seemed to do it in a pretty cool way," he said.

"The rocket as a system is like one integrated system of mechanical / electrical / aerospace where you kind of bring together different skills that you learned," Liang said. 

"It's hands-on," Ramesh said. "It's not, you know, 'Memorize this.' You can see your work."

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