Fredericksburg High School seniors Bodie Houy (left) and Ethan West take their turn in front of engineers viewing through a “cyber portal” from Johnson Space Center during the Critical Design Review of the rocket that will launch a NASA payload this summer at White Sands Missile Range. The students are part of the SystemsGo program developed by Brett Williams and taught by Andrew Matthes. — Photo by Phil Houseal
Taking a step into the 21st century, students at Fredericksburg High School experimented with “the classroom of the tomorrow” Thursday when they linked up with engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in real time for a review of their payloads to be deployed by student-built vehicles at White Sands Missile Range this summer.
“This ‘cyber classroom’ is something we’ve been working on for years and it was our first time to test it,” said Brett Williams, director and founder of SystemsGo, an innovative Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum based on designing and launching rockets.
Fredericksburg Independent School District IT personnel set up a real time, live video and audio cyber hookup between three sites, originating in the Senior Engineering Design & Problem Solving classroom taught by Andrew Matthes, STEM Academy director.
During the Critical Design Review (CDR), high school seniors presented to NASA engineers their payload and vehicle designs being prepared for testing by Goddard Level rockets this summer at WSMR.
According to Matthes, the exciting aspect of this project is that students are working on a real world design. The NASA payload is a test on the survivability of a sample inside a container upon terminal velocity impact. Basically, NASA wants to learn if samples returning from space can survive impact well enough to still be used for scientific purposes. They sent design requirements to the students last fall. This design review was a checkup on the status of the project. The FHS students will be ready to receive the actual canister in April.
“NASA wants to see how the canister survives,” Matthes said. “It is exciting to have the individual recognition from NASA that we can provide niche services to support real world research, that they might otherwise have difficulty finding. This encourages collaboration between students and industry. And students think that is cool.”
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