Student rocketeers from St. Monica’s Homeschool in Ridgefield, CT won the Presentation Competition at the world’s largest student rocketry competition – the American Rocketry Challenge. The students were among the 100 teams competing at the National Finals, which took place at Great Meadow in The Plains, Va. on Sunday, May 19. In total, more than 5,000 students from 922 teams in 45 states competed in the 2024 American Rocketry Challenge.
The students earned $3,000 for winning the Presentation Competition, sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Association of Rocketry. The Presentation Competition allows teams to show off their hard work, explain their design, and demonstrate how test flight data drove decision making. In the National Finals launch, the St. Monica’s students placed 34th out of 100.
The team’s accomplishments follow months of preparation designing, building, and testing a rocket capable of meeting rigorous mission parameters set by the contest’s sponsors – the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), National Association of Rocketry, and more than 20 industry partners. To qualify for the National Finals, participating teams designed, built, and launched model rockets that could safely carry a payload of one raw egg with a target flight duration of 43-46 seconds and an altitude of 820 feet. The requirements for the National Finals were modified to introduce a new challenge to the teams.
Top Row (left to right): Patrick Heffernan, Mary Kelley, John Paul Sebestyen, Peter Schwenk
Bottom row (left to right) Don Daniels (mentor), Sam Sebestyen, Sullivan Bradley, Adam Wilder, Danilo Lopez, Brian Daniels