Rockets soar in Wise County Monday

As the rocket roars skyward, the crowd looks up, trying to follow it with their eyes and find where it comes tumbling back down through the clouds.

They’ve brought their children, their lawn chairs and their umbrellas to the Lonesome Pine Regional Airport to watch the rocket launch even as a light rain falls and thunder rumbles in the distance Monday.

With another successful launch under their belt, 17-year-old high school seniors Austin Stidham and Hunter Page walk triumphantly across the field, carrying a rocket called “Defcon 1” back to the launch pad.

“Once we started building stuff, we just started falling in love with it,” said Austin, whose first dream was to join the Air Force – until he discovered spaceflight.

Now, he said, he wants to pursue rocketry as a career.

“Now I want to be an aerospace engineer,” said Hunter, who, along with his three fellow team members, was introduced to rocket-building a few months ago through a program offered at the county’s technical school.

It culminated in a rocket launch last fall – the first at the regional airport. Monday’s launch was the county’s second, a sight that Wise County Clerk Jack Kennedy, who also serves as secretary of the Virginia Commercial Spaceflight Authority, said will become more common.

Kennedy said programs like this are popping up because the authority, which operates the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on the coast of Virginia, wants to get kids excited about the sciences, in hopes of building a future work force for the commercial spaceflight industry.

This one has funding pieced together from industry, local government and non-profit groups, all hoping to promote education in science and math.

Rocket Boys

Along with a lot of those in attendance Monday, Austin and Hunter say they’ve watched – over and over – the movie “October Sky,” which is based on a book entitled “Rocket Boys,” which chronicles the story of a group of teens in the West Virginia coalfields who built rockets and succeeded against all odds.

Some who turned out to watch the rockets Monday, including School Board Chairman Ted Thompson, were able to look back at their own memories of the mid-20^th century and an era when space exploration inspired the nation.

Thompson recalled his childhood in the Wise County coal camp of Derby, where he and his friends made their own gunpowder and used a pipe with a hole drilled for the fuse to launch projectiles 30 or 40 yards. At first they used coal for the fuel, he said, before discovering that charcoal worked better.

“We didn’t have any official instruction or anything,” he said. “The only thing we had [to go by] was books.”

Standing amid the crowd Monday afternoon, Thompson said the program the county is involved with now “takes it to the next level, where kids are actually learning the principles of rocket science.”

The four members of the team – Austin, Hunter, Brittany Barnes and Heather Lee – were preparing for a national competition. They call themselves SkyTech Rocketry and they launched seven rockets Monday.

Heather said their goal is to compete next spring in the Team America Rocketry Challenge, which brings kids like them from across the country.

She said the contest requires teams to build rockets that will reach a certain height, spend a certain amount of time in the air and land in a designated area – all while carrying an egg that remains intact.

Building the Future

Kennedy said the next generation of space exploration – the field that will likely employ kids like these when they grow up – has a different focus than that of the past.

As the government space program winds to a close, he said, the commercial spaceflight industry is gearing up to pursue space dreams and profit. And while government-funded research will still play a role, private companies will be the ones taking to the skies.

He said there’s potential profit in space tourism, alsthough ultimately the development of space will be driven by a quest for resources.

“We blow up hills right here; we can be putting rockets into space,” said Kennedy, referring to the level of engineering know-how already in use by the area’s mining industry. “We have some of the best engineers in the world here if we give them the opportunity.”

Southwest Virginia may even have a unique role in the future of space exploration. Kennedy said it won’t be too far in the future that skill sets already existing here will be needed on the moon to mine the lunar surface for valuable materials.

“They may not exist today,” he said of the type of companies that might ultimately venture into space to mine for resources. “They may be formed by one of those kids walking out in the field over there [retrieving rockets].”

Wise County officials are also thinking about the next set of rocket boys; the school system is funding a free weeklong space camp for kids in the fifth through eighth grades, which began Monday with 42 enrolled.

Camp Director Jason Hicks said the idea is to spark an interest in science, math and engineering – and get kids excited at an early age about the possibility of careers in these fields.

“We’re trying to get as many people involved in rocketry as we can,” said Giovanni Colberg, manager of a NASA-funded space science program called Wise Develop, who was also involved Monday.

“We want to get scientists out of the community here,” Colberg said. “We want to get them to be our future Nobel Prize winners.”