Launching rockets into the southern U.P. skies
By Lane Whitley, 17, Maggie Guter, 14 and Will Guter, 10.

Five…four…three…two…one…blastoff!

A program at the Kingsford High School allows students to experience launching rockets first hand. The Kingsford High School High-powered Rocketry Program members not only launch rockets, they see the process through from beginning to end. The method starts with building the rockets from a kit. The members take their time and carefully connect parts until the rockets grows to be anywhere from just a couple of feet high to a towering seventeen feet.

Ben Mayconich, eighteen, of Iron Mountain and a recent graduate of Kingsford High School, explains the rocket building process.

“ You start from scratch and it’s usually just a bunch of cardboard tubes and little chunks of wood and you have to cut out most of the pieces and assemble them and then paint them,” he said.

Once the building process is finished, the youth, along with experienced adult advisors, haul their rockets out to a field at the former Groveland mine site, which is north of Iron Mountain, and blow them into the atmosphere. The rockets are launched not only for the kids’ own amusement, but also for the entertainment of an excited crowd of spectators who come from all around Dickinson County to watch the rockets fly.

Jonie Panick, eighteen, of Kingsford and also a recent graduate of Kingsford High School, describes her excitement when her rockets are launched.

“ It’s pretty cool. You get to see a big old rocket go way up into the sky until you can barely see it,” she said. “It’s really neat.”

The high schoolers aren’t the only ones who get to launch the rockets. They also recruit help if there are any younger children in the crowd. Joshua Arnold, twelve, of Iron Mountain, was at the program’s most recent launch earlier this summer. He was recruited to help the program members set up the launch pad.

“ We had to take these wires and we put them up these holes [in the engines] and we had to tape them on so they would stay,” Arnold said. “Then we hooked battery-powered clips onto them to have their power source so they could launch.”

The group of students from Kingsford High School occasionally travels to Wisconsin to shoot off rockets with other rocketry groups in that state. Bill Bertoldi, the program advisor and a teacher at the Kingsford High School, said it was in Wisconsin that the Kingsford students launched their tallest rocket ever.

“ It was 17-feet, four-inches tall, it weighed a 105 pounds and it flew about a mile,” he said.

According to Bertoldi, the bigger the rockets are, the more they cost to fly.

“ For a motor load and rocket it would be about $100 for the smaller ones,” he said. “When we get up to the larger ones, the motor’s going to be about $200 and the parts for it are probably going to be about the same.”

The rockets usually fly upwards of 2,500 feet before coming safely back to Earth via parachute. Sometimes, however, the rockets are destined to fail. Mayconich said you never know what might happen.

“ We launched one that was still connected to the launch pad and we launched the whole launch pad,” he said. “We shot it a couple feet into the ice.”

Brandon Carlson, nineteen, of Iron Mountain, has been shooting off rockets with the program since his high school days. He explains that there are many problems that can occur while shooting off the rockets.

“ There are a number of reasons why a rocket won’t launch,” he said. “A short in the electrical connection, a bad igniter, bad motor, anything like that.”

Sometimes the parachutes fail to open properly. One larger rocket was severely damaged during the group’s latest launch when its chute did not open and it crashed landed.

The group observes a number of safety rules to keep the launchers and the crowd safe, including an ignition system that has very long electrical wires. According to Bertoldi, they even close off the airspace above their launch site.

Carlson’s father John usually shoots off rockets with his son. He thinks that building and launching rockets helps the students involved in the program in a number of ways.

“ It gives the kids some real work experience with some engineering and mathematics, graphics, things like that,” he said. “Just helps the kids solve problems and have a little fun putting some things together that are pretty cool.”

Bertoldi said there are many reasons he started the program, including the fact that many of the students that go through this program are entering science, math, and engineering fields in college.

“ We see a lot of our students go into science, mathematics and engineering once they graduate and a lot of them go into it because of their work within this program,” Bertoldi said. “The other purpose of it is the students do this and they have a lot of fun with it. So they learn science and they have a lot of fun doing science.”

The program is an extracurricular activity at Kingsford High School. It is not related to any specific class, and the kids meet after school.

The members of the Kingsford High School High-Powered Rocketry Program got involved for several different reasons.

Panick says she became part of it because she thought all aspects of the program sounded interesting.

“ The thing that got me interested was the whole chemistry of it––the electronic work and the building process.”

Others, like Mayconich, got involved because of their parents’ influence.

“When I was little I used to come out here and launch rockets with my dad and mom.”

The rockets are launched several times during the year, and if you’d like to attend one of the launches, it is free, and the public is encouraged to come out. For more information, visit www.kingsford.org/khsWeb/rfs/tripoliuppermichigan.