Lytle Junior High Students Create Their Own Manned Space Program

Students in Mr. Clamon's SmartLab 2 class sent an astronaut in the lower atmosphere recently. The class has designed and built their own model rockets and began testing them recently with launches from the Junior High practice field.

The first launch from the program included a special passenger. Bob the Beetle was chosen to ride in the this rocket's special payload section.

The beetle was shot into the sky about 200 feet and then recovered, safe and alive. He was released in the wild shortly after. Students used a special computer aided design software package to design their rockets, then built and painted them.

All rockets have now been test launched - some successfully, some not so successfully.

Each rocket launch was tracked by a ground team who tracked each rocket's progress using an altitude tracker. The trackers - basically a glorified protractor - gave the angle from ground team's position to the apogee of the rocket's flight. Using the angle, the distance from the ground team to the launch site and some simple trigonometry, the student's calculated the rockets' maximum altitude.