The rocket glistens in the sunlight, highlighting its aerodynamic figure and jutted fins at the bottom. 

3, 2, 1, blastoff!

All of the sudden, it springs to life propelling itself upwards into the vast blue sky.

At the beginning of the 2023-24 school year, club president Aarav Kushan had a revelation: CHS9 needed an Aerospace Club.

“I had a passion for aerospace and rocketry in general and I wanted to share that with other people,” Kushan said. “I didn’t really see that organization at CHS9 so I wanted to create one.”

With the assistance of friends, Kushan quickly put together the CHS9 Aerospace Club, sponsored by a familiar face, computer science teacher Seneca Hart.

“I actually used to teach at Coppell Middle School East and this is my first year at CHS9,” Hart said. “There were students that knew me and they approached me and said ‘we would like to compete in this American Rocketry Challenge and we want to build a club around it. I knew they were good kids and they were hard workers, so I agreed to be their sponsor.”

With members taking charge of competitions and rocket designs, they still had to learn about what it means to run a club.

“When they first met, it was a lot of research and learning about what the process of the competition that they wanted to enter was like,” Hart said. “They also spent a lot of time learning how we conduct a meeting and how everybody’s ideas can be heard. After that, as the year progressed, it became less about informational meetings and it was more about why they were meeting; it was because they were actually doing something.”

While the passion students have for this club is clear, it did not start this way.

“Last year, I remember Aarav just came up to me and asked if I wanted to join the Aerospace Club with him,” structural and design lead Jayanth Yamunan said. “At first, I didn’t really think that it would be a thing but this year I went to the second meeting and realized ‘oh, we’re actually doing something here.’ It developed over the first semester into a real club.”

Once the team had been put together, the task at hand was simple: raise money. In order to achieve this, the club hosted a car wash raising enough to get started on their rocket.

“We had seen the band do it a couple times before and the cheerleaders at Coppell High School so we thought ‘why not just do that,” Yamunan said. “It was put together last-minute, all the advertising was done the night before and the majority of people that came were friends and family, but we ended up getting about $350.”

Nights and days off were spent trying to perfect the rocket. It was through these efforts that club members began to bond as well as develop their interests in aerospace.

“I got more interested as we were going through the developmental and design phase,” Yamunan said. “I remember there were nights where it was just me, vice president Pranav Suryadevara and a few others working on the rocket over winter break and the process of designing and creating something really got me into it.”

The club is preparing its rocket for the ultimate test: the American Rocketry Challenge (ARC) in April 7-14 in Virginia. Numerous test launches and redesigns have been a part of the club’s efforts to reach consistent altitudes and flight times.

“Initially we didn’t actually understand the competition,” Yamunan said. “Our initial design process was to keep the rocket as stable as possible and make it go as high as possible. But then we contacted the ARC successful inventor, Buzz McDermott, and we found out that the actual purpose of the competition was to get to about 820 feet. We had to radically change how we were making the rocket.”

To meet this goal, club members hold test launches on weekends at Dallas Area Rocketry Society launch field to see where they can improve the rocket’s design.

“I feel like we are much more organized,” Suryadevara said. “I remember our first launch was heavily disorganized, we didn’t know what we were doing. Now we have these checklists and we can get everything done.” 

Through these experiences, members have grown not only in their knowledge of rocketry, but also as individuals.

“It was amazing to see them really grow up,” Hart said. “They really were very passionate about wanting to do this. They were so focused on the goal that it really helped them come together as a team and realize that no one person was going to be able to do it by themselves, so they were gonna have to work together. I’m really proud of what they’ve accomplished.”

While the competition will be over in mid-April and the members soon moving on from CHS9, they hope this isn’t the end of their journey.

“I think that’s the hope,” Yamunan said. “I have a couple friends in the grade below that may be interested. The hope has always been that this is a lasting club and that we can create something like this at CHS. We want to keep it going.”

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