DALLAS — With an upcoming historic trip to the moon for NASA, a college class in Dallas has decided to get in on the excitement and have its own liftoff to celebrate.
On Saturday, NASA is planning to launch its new moon rocket on a test flight, after engine trouble halted the first countdown this week.
Managers said Tuesday they are changing fueling procedures to deal with the issue. A bad sensor also could be to blame for Monday's scrapped launch, they noted.
The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket — the most powerful ever built by NASA — remains on its pad at Kennedy Space Center with an empty crew capsule on top.
Dallas College’s Richland Campus was planning to have a watch party for the launch during its initial Friday flight but instead decided to create a more interactive experience for some of its students that same day.
On Friday, the campus’ Science, Technology, Engineering and Math – or STEM – program had its students build their own rockets. While not 322 feet tall, they had plenty of power to them. Just ask the director of the campus’ STEM institute Jason Treadway, who has been with the program since 2017.
"I mean, they go 1,500 feet in the air,” Treadway said. "It's just a cool way of exposing them to STEM."
Not just exposing the students to STEM but providing hands-on experience at the start of the semester.
“Giving them exposure, particularly early on,” Treadway said. “I think it's very important."
The students were building what is known as “Estes rockets,” which are reasonably-sized model rockets that are simple enough to build but complicated enough to learn from.
“They're having to critically think and problem-solve this,” Treadway said. “I want them to figure out what to do."
It’s a feeling that Jessica Gonzalez had at one point and convinced her to get into this field of work. She is the STEM Research Program Project Lead for the Richland Campus.
“We all have that moment that really determines whether or not you're going to go into a stem field,” Gonzalez said. “That moment is either determined by an experience such as this or by interacting with a certain faculty member or certain staff member. somebody who really makes a difference."
Daniel Dimitrov is a student in this program who got to fire off one of the rockets Friday afternoon.
"It went great,” Dimitrov said. “It went way better than I expected, honestly. We thought it wasn't going to go anywhere but it went really high. I was pretty surprised. It made a really cool sound. It's nothing that I've seen before."
Both Treadway and Gonzalez said this is also a great way for the students to get to know one another early in the semester and build trust in terms of building things and working on projects together.
“It’s a moment for these students to maybe come together, get to know other classmates, and get to know that this STEM center is here at Richland,” Gonzalez said. “We want to be a support system for all different types of careers.”
To learn more about the Richland STEM Resource Center, you can click here.