When my English teacher first announced that Go For Launch! was coming to our school, it instantly piqued my interest. I had never heard of this program before, mostly because these kinds of opportunities are very scarce in my town. Needless to say, hearing that we would have the chance to meet an astronaut and design an experiment that would potentially be sent to the ISS instantly convinced me to attend the event.
Upon arrival on the first day, I was surprised to see just how many students showed up, some of which were from out of town and had driven up to an hour to attend this event. Admittedly, the amount of competition I would be facing made me nervous but that changed once I saw that some classmates were already inside. I approached them and we agreed to be part of the same team, along with two other students. As we worked together on the different challenges and activities, I noticed we had good chemistry and I felt that we were building good momentum. This made me more confident coming into day two which is when we would finally have to design and present our final project. We all brainstormed together and drafted up different concepts and ideas and assigned each other tasks leveraging our strengths and weaknesses.
Finally, after working on our project for hours and presenting it, it was time to announce the winner. My team and I jumped up in joy after hearing our team be declared the winner. We couldn’t believe an idea we had would actually become a reality.
Flash forward many months of waiting due to delays, our experiment finally has a launch date attached to it. In a little over a week from now, the wait will finally be over and I know it will all be worth it. Knowing I will be flown out to Florida to watch my experiment launch to the International Space Station with my team and family has brought a lot of excitement and anticipation into my life.
Our experiment is based around measuring how legumes grow in zero gravity conditions and I hope that the information gathered by our project will contribute to the prospect of potentially sustaining life on Mars in the future. I am incredibly grateful to Higher Orbits and Go For Launch! for giving our small town a chance and bringing such an incredible opportunity to its citizens. I am extremely excited to witness the rocket launch with my own eyes and to see what kind of information it will bring.
Written by Stellar Student, Nicolas Reyna, Team Icarus, Winners of Go For Launch! Nogales 2024
