Why Does Presidio Have One of the Best High School Rocketry Clubs in the Country?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I love Texas Monthly, I find that at least once a month they match the Los Angeles Times for in depth non partisan stories that are intended to teach us about ourselves as a nation, past and present. They emphasize our strengths and weaknesses and how we use them to our advantage.
If it's no surprise that the poorest neighborhoods in the world produce the best soccer players or basketball players, this should be no surprise either.
It’s possible to build a model rocket in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, but those who live in the remote West Texas border town of Presidio face an extra challenge: the nearest Home Depot is nearly four hours away, in Odessa. So, Presidio High School’s rocketry club typically goes to the local Dollar Tree to purchase many of their rocket-building materials instead.
Dish sponges and cardboard, petroleum jelly and duct tape—those are a few of the items that the group of Presidio teenagers bought for a few dollars during recent trips to the store. Once those household items were hooked up to a fifty-newton, four-inch-tall motor and fueled with a few ounces of gunpowder, they were transformed into a rocket that qualified for the world’s largest student rocketry competition.
And on a warm and humid morning in mid-May, nearly two thousand miles from the Chihuahuan Desert, the students prepared to launch it nearly a thousand feet in the air.
“I’m so nervous right now,” the team’s captain, Presidio High senior Leonardo Uribe, said as he watched another team’s rocket explode. “I just hope it doesn’t blow up like that one.”
His team was one of 101 that had bested 729 other middle school and high school rocket clubs to qualify for the national finals at the Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC), held annually in The Plains, Virginia. A ticket to Paris, for the international finals, was on the line. The Virginia venue, a horse pasture forty miles west of Washington, D.C., had been converted into a rocket launch field with a perpetual “3 . . . 2 . . . 1” blaring over the loudspeakers. This year’s theme: a tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing.
Hiding his nerves, Uribe, a trim nineteen-year-old wearing a Casio calculator watch, led his seven teammates to the big white tent where they would pull the requisite parts from a yellow toolbox and, in just thirty minutes, reassemble their three-foot-tall miniature rocket. They had named it Agripino, for no reason in particular, like the way some parents in their families had picked children’s names from the Mexican calendar of saints.
The team’s designated artist, Paola Flotte, had painted the bottom half to look like the Apollo 11 rocket and the top half to look like home, a landscape of cacti brushing up against a starry blue sky. To prepare it for launch, Flotte, a seventeen-year-old with a warm smile who moved to Presidio from Mexico in the third grade, sprinkled clumps of shredded newspaper into the bottom cylinder; the paper was intended to function as insulation, a wall between the gunpowder explosion and the rest of the rocket. Others greased the gunpowder-filled motor with petroleum jelly, to prevent the rocket parts surrounding the motor case from sticking during launch. The rocket, equipped with three parachutes for landing, carried three raw eggs as passengers, wrapped snugly in the dollar-store dish sponges.
continue reading this long article ( lot's of pictures) here...
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In other words, Presidio is virtually in the middle of nowhere on the US side of the Big Bend. No Man's land.
With approximately 4,000 residents, it is the 3rd largest County in Texas.
And it's kids qualify to get to work with NASA based on hard work and being frugal with their resources.
Truly "food for thought".
Very cool story, thanks for this. I don't know Texas well, is this area for the most part flat land...not many trees? If so that's perfect for launching rockets, (for obvious reasons). When I was in HS in the mid 1980's, we had a rocket club as well, nothing like this of course but I learned a lot and it was something I passed on to my son who at 24 years old, still loves launching model rockets.
I enjoy needling my bride about how frigging flat Texas is. When you drive East Texas north to South nothing changes.
Most Texans from Dallas Ft Worth to Houston down through Austin and San Antono are living on the floor of an ancient sea.
However it's what we don't see driving to the west.
I am a shade over 800 feet ASL, (804 feet). If I go to the local store which is 3 miles from my door, I drop 702 feet. Lots of hills and mountains here in WA. Many years ago....(30?), had a friend fly up from Florida to visit...she had never been out of Florida in her life. She was in shock when she stepped off the plane and saw Mt. Rainier.
But yea, I spent a summer in Southern Oklahoma, (Marlow), when I was a teen and it's flat as hell too.
Very cool.
Thank you.