Students Draft Parts to Send into Space

By Clair Merchant
SIATech Math Teacher, Albuquerque Job Corps Center

Students at the Albuquerque Job Corps Center have brought their dreams of space down to earth.  William Isaac Jr., Brandon Slim, Alfredo Castillo, and Rodolfo Sanchez are working with Microgravity Enterprises Inc. (MEI) and Star Base La Luz at Kirtland Air Force Base (KAFB) to design containers and retro fit a bulk head and container harness into the nose cone of an Up Aerospace Rocket.

The rockets will launch from Spaceport America later this year and be in orbit above the earth's atmosphere for about five minutes before returning to White Sands Missile Range. The students’ project will be on every launch on which MEI has commercial payloads.  MEI currently sells Space20TM and AntimatterTM Energy Drink, which are commercially available beverages fortified with vitamins and minerals that have been in space.

Under the guidance of their mathematics teachers and project sponsor Clair Merchant, the students created these space-ready containers. They are slightly larger than a tuna can and are designed to hold student science projects from schools across the nation as part of the ACCESS for Education Program. The projects come from students ranging in age from kindergarten through graduate school, and focus on the effects of microgravity on food, medicine, and material development.

The students’ parts have already been manufactured from their solid files and are ready to begin housing student projects. The containers and the students’ designs will be made available on a limited basis initially.  Eventually the students’ designs and solid files will be used as the template to manufacture containers for schools across the country.  The students’ blueprints have also been included in the appendix for the ACCESS Program’s Student Manual. See http://microgravityenterprises.com/AboutAccess.htm for more info about being involved with the ACCESS Program.  
 
As part of this project, the team of students, along with Keith Horse Looking, Jr. and Chelsie Alderette, recently visited KAFB Research Laboratory and toured the machine shop. At the machine shop, the students learned about manufacturing parts from raw aluminum and carbon fiber. The students enjoyed seeing their finished parts and learning how their AutoDesk Inventor files plug directly into the machine, as the machine makes the parts.

Through this project our students learned about AutoDesk, file extensions, engineering process, blueprint standards, blueprint title blocks, machine shops, editing blueprints, graphic editing programs, and Microsoft PowerPoint. The students produced eight final blueprints and assembly drawings, five parts to launch into space, and a PowerPoint presentation about their work. The students will present this spring at a symposium for high school students in the Star Base La Luz program and at each of their Senior Presentations (the final graduation requirement for their High School Diploma). The students also hope to travel this spring to see the launch of the Up Aerospace Rocket containing their projects. By the next launch, a new team of students, Lead by Keith Horse Looking hopes to have completed a project to fly in one of the containers they helped design.