Fishburne Rocket Club Blasts Off
Fishburne Military School’s Rocket Club Has First Launch of Season
Monterey, VA — The Fishburne Military School Rocketeers traveled to their usual launch site in Monterey, VA to launch rockets on Saturday as part of the Teen America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) program.
Team Advisor, CPT Tom Galloway, noted “[Our Cadets] had a good first launch but found their rockets were overweight once chutes, motors, and 2-egg payloads were installed. One rocket was stripped down to meet the weight limit but there was no room for weight adjustments if more mass were needed to be added to reduce the altitude”.
Despite the initial setback, all of the Caissons’ rocket launches were successful in that all chutes deployed perfectly and no eggs were broken in landing.
According to Galloway, the cadets learned much from this launch and are expected to design around the problems they encountered. One major lesson learned was that the motor the cadets originally designed their rockets for is not powerful enough. “We will have to go back to more expensive and powerful 29mm diameter F motors,” Galloway explains.
One other group on hand for the event Saturday came from the engineering team at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. The 7-member team drove from Tennessee to launch at the VAST site. Cadets from FMS were able to interact with some of these team members to glean a little advice and learn a bit about college-level rocketry.
Fishburne Military School is the oldest and smallest of all military schools for boys in Virginia. Its college-prep curriculum is built on the structure of an Army JROTC program. FMS has been designated as a JROTC Honor Unit with Distinction and may nominate qualified candidates to the United States Service Academies. Fishburne hosts one of only four Summer JROTC programs in the nation that is accredited by US Army Cadet Command.
