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Photos courtesy of Vestavia Hills Elementary Dolly Ridge.
The United Launce Alliance Student Rocket Launch in Pueblo, Colorado for, in July.
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Photos courtesy of Vestavia Hills Elementary Dolly Ridge.
Students at Vestavia Hills Elementary Dolly Ridge developed a weather sensor and payload for the rocket.
A group of Vestavia Hills Elementary School Dolly Ridge students recently traveled to Colorado to watch a payload they built get launched in a United Launch Alliance rocket.
The students were a part of Rachael Franklin’s fifth-grade gifted class. Dolly Ridge was the only elementary school in the nation chosen to take part in the program.
The payload project selected by Franklin’s students was constructed to monitor weather data in rural and remote areas.
“This was our second time to participate, so we had learned a lot from our experience in 2021,” Franklin said. “With the amount of severe weather that we see in our area, monitoring weather data was our idea in 2021 and this year.”
The payload built by the students included devices to track weather data as part of a weather warning system in rural Alabama, according to their application to ULA.
“This year, we improved our design,” Franklin said. “We knew what would work. We knew how much space we would have. I was able to show them pictures. I had pictures of the previous payload.”
Leading up to the launch, the students made 3D designs in a computer-aided design program, analyzed the results of their tests and built the payload.
“This time, we focused mainly on the structure and the material science that would protect whatever we made,” Franklin said. “We knew it was going to get tossed and thrown somewhere. The 2021 device only gathered part of the data after it broke in half upon launch. We had to prove that the structure was going to withstand the drops, the acceleration and the heat, because that’s where we failed last time.”
While the students focused on protecting the device more, they could not account for what would happen once it was launched, especially with several payloads in each rocket. Unfortunately, an issue with a payload in front of the Dolly Ridge students’ payload caused theirs to get stuck in the rocket instead of it being released. The payload crashed with the rocket.
“When it reaches the apex of the highest point, the rocket has sensors, and it’s supposed to separate and break apart so that the nose cone comes back down separately and then breaks in half, and then all of the payloads are thrown out,” Franklin said. “You can see it, but it’s teeny tiny. We noticed payloads came off, but there wasn’t as many as there were supposed to be. We had put colorful parachutes on our payload, and we didn’t see those colors.”
The ULA representatives had to cut the Dolly Ridge payload out of the rocket.
“All the kids sat in a huddle together,” Franklin said. “It was dead silent, and it just came out and crumbled.”
Despite the crash, Franklin said it was a great learning experience for the students.
“Two of my astronaut friends said it is the best learning experience they could have gotten,” she said. “Even if it’s not engineering and it’s not a rocket, something you design, something you work on, is going to fail at some point. How you handle it makes all the difference, so it was a successful failure, perhaps.”
Students who participated on the rocket team were Reid Purvis, Cora Moorhouse, Benjamin Black, George Cochran, Olivia Bodkin, Kate Howell, Ryan Wu, Will Ennis and Caleb Martin.
