For a year, students at Cristo Rey Jesuit school spent five hours a week designing science experiments that would be flown to the International Space Station by the Antares rocket.
On Tuesday they gathered excitedly near the launch site on the Virginia coast to watch their work soar into space. However, all that effort went up in smoke after six seconds as the rocket exploded and sank to earth in a furious orange fireball.
Among the unmanned mission’s cargo was a variety of student projects, including experiments created by schools in Texas, New Jersey and Michigan.
Photo: AFP
Pupils at Cristo Rey, a Catholic high school for students from low-income families in Houston, started work on the project in August last year as part of a pilot program spearheaded by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space.
Two teams of eight juniors and eight seniors formed a special design class and built two experiments to see how slime moulds and lipid mimics would behave in a microgravity environment.
Four recent graduates and six seniors traveled from Houston, Chicago, California and even Australia to the viewing area about 11km from the launch site. Liftoff was originally planned for Monday, then delayed when a sailboat entered the restricted zone, but the students and teachers managed to reschedule their flights so they could stay for an extra day.
All seemed normal as the rocket began to rise at 6:22pm. Within seconds, though, the group and about 150 others were being urgently evacuated and the science class had turned into a lesson about the inherent risks of space flight.
“When it went off I could see something was wrong because it wasn’t lifting as it should. We saw the ignition and a couple of seconds into it … I’ve seen a lot of launches, I used to live near the Cape [Canaveral] in Florida, and the rocket wasn’t going up as it should. I could tell that, and then there was kind of a spark and an absolutely huge explosion,” said one of the teachers, Greg Adragna, as the group headed home on Wednesday.
“You could actually feel the shockwave from the explosion where we were standing. And then NASA officials immediately after that came and of course evacuated the area,” he said.
A student, Peter Obi, said he initially thought the massive burst of light was part of the plan.
“I had never seen a launch before so when it got up I thought it was supposed to happen, but then they started evacuating us so I knew something had gone wrong,” the 17-year-old said. “Obviously we had fun creating the project and when you see something you created be destroyed, that’s definitely a feeling that isn’t pleasant.”
Yesenia Zetino, an 18-year-old now at Loyola University in Chicago, said: “I think just in general we’re past that initial shock, that stage that we were in yesterday, and we’re just thinking about it, reflecting on it now and kind of thinking about what’s next. We’re realizing how crazy it is that something can be [destroyed] that we have no control over … It was really surreal, it happened so fast.”
At another Houston school that contributed two experiments, Awty International, 54 students had spent a year working on a way to measure the growth of three different strains of yeast.
They had designed and engineered the project, packing the yeast, wiring and hardware into a 10cm by 10cm box that would be plugged in at the space station, generate data and then be flown back to Earth after 28 days for analysis.
“I did watch it live, it was shocking and I was really at a loss for words, full of disbelief,” said Jessika Smith, a fifth-grade science teacher who followed the launch from Houston. “[To do] something so amazingly difficult, to get to that point and have something like that happen, I was definitely in tears.”
Smith said that her pupils were “very sad” but philosophical — recognizing that there had been value in the whole experience and relieved that no one was hurt.
“We’ve made our students very aware that as with everything in research you have setbacks and this is one of them,” she said.
At Hobby middle school in San Antonio, students gathered in Serena Connally’s classroom to watch the liftoff.
“It was not devastating, but it was pretty close,” the sixth-grade teacher said. “The kids, their reaction was, ‘OK, when do we redo this?’ They were ready to go again. They were disappointed but they weren’t beaten.”
On board was a translucent fluid-mixing tube designed to reveal how crystals would change in size and shape in space.
Connally said that it would be easy to make another tube and she had been told on Wednesday that the experiment will get to go on board another craft at a future launch.
Zetino said that it had been a worthwhile endeavor despite what NASA understatedly termed a “mishap.”
“I think it was worth it. It wasn’t just about it going up but the experience in general. We worked so hard for such a long time, there was definitely more learning that happened and there was a lot of takeaways that still made it worth it,” he said.
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