Space Coast middle school students learn rocket propulsion ahead of Artemis I launch
As crews prepare to launch NASA's massive moon rocket on the Artemis 1 mission, teachers on the Space Coast are seizing a learning opportunity for the next generation of potential scientists.
The launch will provide some disruption for schools — BPS expects spectators to snarl traffic when 100,000 to 500,000 visitors to come to Brevard for the Monday morning launch, likely impacting the district's bus routes — but teachers at Southwest Middle School also saw a chance to get kids interested in math.
“This is math in real life,” media specialist Carrie Friday said to students on Friday morning. “I’ve been teaching for a long time, and I always hear, ‘Well, I’m not going to use this in real life.’ But you do.”
At Southwest Middle School, 7th and 8th grade honors math students gathered in the media center on Friday morning for a lesson on rocket propulsion from math teacher Maira Toenjes and Friday, who happens to be the wife of an engineer working on the NASA project. Friday explained to them how the launch window of the Space Launch System rocket depends on the Earth’s relative position to the moon, how the rocket pushes off from Earth to enter space, and how precise the calculations for such a large and expensive rocket must be. The rocket will boost an Orion capsule into a 42-day orbit around the moon.
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Then she taught students to perform a low-tech rocket experiment of their own. In it, the kids blow a certain number of breaths into a balloon, tape it to a straw threaded onto some fishing line strung between two chairs and release the balloon. It propels itself along the fishing line with the force of the air escaping the opening. The students measured how far the balloon went with a unit of measure they’d chosen, such as a yardstick or a left shoe, and attempted to calculate how far each breath propelled the balloon.
While releasing balloons in a library is a pretty low-stakes activity, Friday urged the students to take the tests seriously, as the launch team for Artemis must.
“When you're at practice, do you practice just like you would play in a game?” Friday said. “This (rocket) cost billions of dollars. You're not going to just put it together and hope for the best and explode that much money.”
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Like a launch team, the students assigned themselves different roles. One in each group jotted down measurements on a table, one exhaled a certain number of times into a balloon, and one measured the length the balloon travelled. “I’d say we made it to Earth orbit already,” a student holding a yardstick quipped when his group’s balloon smacked into the chair and fell from the straw.
Friday, whose husband, Anthony Friday, is a member of the crew in charge of propelling the rocket, said she checked the slideshow with him Thursday night to make sure she had the details correct. One slide featured a picture of him behind a computer in a headset; students kept asking her if he was going to space, so she wanted to show a photo of him in action, she said.
The school is clearly buzzing with excitement for the Monday morning launch; in the teacher’s planning room next to the media center, staff members chat about going to watch the launch.
Friday and her daughters will get a close view due to her husband’s role, but she’ll also have to arrive at 3 a.m. in the morning to claim a parking spot. She said she's excited and relieved to watch the launch her husband helped make possible.
"He's been working some crazy hours," Friday said.
Bailey Gallion is the education reporter for FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Gallion at 321-242-3786 or bgallion@floridatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Brevard County students participate in Artemis I-themed STEM lessons
