By GREGORY ZELLER //
The youngsters representing The Stony Brook School at a prestigious national competition next week in Virginia are absolute rocket scientists.
That’s not hyperbole – Sebastian Guadalupe-Peña, David Guo, Justin Hu, Stasiu Sack, David Zhang, Vincent Zhao and Roger Zhou, all students at the private college-prep/boarding school for students in grades 7 through 12, are not merely smart, they’re quite literally ace rocketeers. And they aim to prove it May 18 at the National Finals Fly Off, the championship round of the 2024 American Rocketry Challenge.
Now in its 22nd year, the ARC is the world’s largest rocketry contest, with nearly 5,000 U.S. middle- and high-schoolers competing each year. Their mission: to design, build and launch model rockets that check off certain flight parameters, solving complex mathematical and engineering problems along the way.
Chin-Tang Liu: High hopes.
Specifically, teams were required to design, build and launch model rockets that safely carried one large hen egg to a minimum altitude of 820 feet, remained airborne for precisely 43 to 46 seconds and separated into two parts (the “egg compartment” and the rocket engine) after reaching apogee (the highest point of the flight), with both parts returning safely to the ground via parachute.
The finals will see 100 teams – whittled down from more than 900 nationwide teams to enter the annual competition – converging on Great Meadow, a 380-acre field events center located in The Plains, VA. At stake are $100,000 in prizes, with the National Champion also earning an all-expenses-paid trip to London to compete in the International Rocketry Challenge this July.
Reaching the finals is an especially impressive feat for The Stony Brook School team (dubbed the “BrookX Rocketry Team”), which has never before entered the ARC competition.
Not only were they rookie competitors, but lacking a large enough field on campus, the team had to hit the road to find a suitable spot to test its rockets. Ultimately, BrookX borrowed space from the CATO Rocketry Club in Connecticut and the METRA Rocket Club, a private group of enthusiasts based on Pine Island in upstate Orange County.
It’s not rocket science: Actually, it is … but BrookX was up to the challenge.
Their relative inexperience and home-field disadvantage proved to be minor obstacles for the determined squad, which emerged as one of seven New York teams to reach the 2024 ARC finals – and the only team from Long Island.
According to advisor Chin-Tang Liu, a physics and mathematics teacher at The Stony Brook School, the rocketeers’ success showcases the power of team spirit.
“As a rookie team, we do not know how far we can go this year,” Liu told Innovate Long Island. “But with a motto – Assertiveness, Resilience and Collaboration – we can go well farther than we [could] imagine at the start of the year.”
