?By MC1 Lewis Hunsaker

Students in Dr. Oleg Yakimenko's Engineering Systems Design course display their rockets following a prelaunch inspection in Root Hall, May 18. For the first time, students in the class have built and will launch their own rockets at the Mojave Desert in Southern California.

"This class provides students with the opportunity to put together all the stages of a project in order to see how everything works," said Yakimenko. "If everything goes well from this launch, the next class will build two-stage rockets in teams of two."

For this current project, each student was provided a rocket kit to construct and modify as needed on their own. When launched, each rocket will gather acceleration and altimeter data to compare and analyze against predicted software data for each rocket.

"This class provides us with the opportunity to see the various stages of a project," added systems engineering student Cmdr. Chris Hall. "This will help most of the students later on when they are working in the acquisitions field and each project is in a different stage of production."