Manhattan aeronautics and space administration, like a blackhole, likes to pull people into their club with how much you can do at Manhattan High School.
“From what I’ve seen right now we’re getting more and more members,” sponsor Ethan Shippy said.
MASA is a group of students who are interested in aerodynamics and rocketry.
“We are interested in lots of different things in aerospace engineering, but also dive into some electrical engineering and any branch of engineering,” senior Andrew Meng, president, said. “But we also have some areas for business and lots of learning to be done.”
Students partake in building planes or rockets, along with engineering on how to protect an egg to prepare for the competition.
“The build team will build it. We were looking into splitting into a few groups, to make..different designs, bring them all together, and then, hopefully, we’ll have a nice rocket that gets points based on altitude and if it has an egg in it,” Meng said. “So this egg, if it doesn’t get cracked, after the launch, then you get extra points.”
MASA participates in a competition called the American Rocketry Challenge in the spring. In this challenge students engineer a way to launch and safely land an egg out of their rocket.
“To do that, you have to have a sponsor come out and actually watch the launch,” Shippy said. “So we’ll do that, and depending on how we do it, we’ll go to the next level. So there’s multiple competitions that you go to get to the next level.”
As MASA grows members are working hard to inform new members about what they do. Their meetings consist of a variety of things from testing out motorized planes in the courtyard or parking lot to calculating the mass of the materials and the eggs.
“We have our different leaders walk them through some things. Right now, we’re in the process of just learning everything, learning the basics of the softwares we’re using, all the materials,” Meng said.
MASA hopes to continue to grow and go to more competitions over time, as well as fundraise more for future projects.
“We do a lot of cool stuff. It’s still a smaller club, and we always love having more people,” sophomore Jonathan Brown said.
