Within just its first year of being an official club, MASA has already taken giant leaps towards expanding, improving, and continuing the success of their club. The keystone for their development has been the American Rocketry Challenge, a national competition taking place in the spring.
The American Rocketry Challenge takes the classic egg drop experiment and quite literally flips it on its head: instead of dropping an egg, MASA and other ARC competitors shoot an egg as high as they can without breaking it.
“This is everyone’s first time doing it,” sponsor Ethan Shippy said. “So we’re still not quite sure what to expect, but it’s really cool to be able to experience everything for the first time. It’s been really exciting to learn the programming involved and start to experience what it’s like to put together a real rocket that can be a competitor in the challenge.”
The ARC isn’t a typical competition where teams travel to a new location. Instead, in March, judges come to the teams. The top 100 teams throughout the country advance on to nationals. In Washington, D.C. Although it’s a long way off, MASA aspires to reach nationals.
“It would be a big achievement,” club president Andrew Meng, senior, said. “I think it would be really crazy, but I think it would be a lot of fun. We’d have to look into our funds and see how we would make it possible though.”
Even with competition being months away, the grind for MASA has already started.
“We just designed two rockets, and so we’re going to build both of them, and then we will be testing them once they’re all built,” Meng said. We’re hoping to get some laser cutting done on some balsa fins, and then hopefully we can get started assembling and testing the rocket by spring.”
Aside from rocketry, MASA has another division of its club: Aviation. Even though it was a late addition to the club, it’s become one of the driving forces of MASA.
“I feel really great about our aviation team,” Meng said. “I feel like it’s a little more of a relaxed pace, and it gets us interested in things that are inside of our atmosphere, using fluid dynamics and how the air works.
Even without a competition to work towards, aviation has their own ambitions.
“We’ve been making all sorts of planes,” aviation head Peyton Overturf, senior, said. “We’ve just had kit builds, and then we have plans on making some of our own from scratch.”
Aviation was a response to an unexpected influx of new members, something that MASA hopes to continue as so many seniors will be graduating this year.
“I have a great group of hard working and dedicated, young and ambitious students that have a passion for engineering and all things science and math,” Shippy said. “It’s really cool to see them be able to participate in something where they can really get a chance to get some hands-on experience about what they’re passionate about.”