Astral Orbit

Marquette High School wins the 2020-2021 American Rocketry Challenge Marketing Competition, beating out 614 other rocketry teams from across the country.

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Last Monday, Marquette High School of Chesterfield, Missouri earned the title of 2020-2021 Marketing Competition Champions at the world’s largest student rocketry competition - The American Rocketry Challenge. 

 

The Marquette High School Team, also recognized as “Astral Orbit,” consists of 6 members, Ben Cook (Junior), Alex Chen (Sophomore), Aniruddh Kommareddy (Senior), Rusty Willis (Sophomore), Andrew Wu (Freshman), and Jason Zhao (Freshman). Astral Orbit outcompeted over 600 other teams across the nation that were also challenged to participate in the Marketing Competition. In a brief two-minute video, Astral Orbit showcased their passion, their inspiration, and all the hard work they’ve poured into this competition. In addition, they also qualified for the national finals by placing Top 100 in the country in qualification flights. 

 

Recalling over three years of diligent and dedicated work, the Astral Orbit Rocketry team landed a well-deserved title. On June 28th, the team was greeted with the incredible news. However, this sweet moment came with its fair share of extraordinary challenges. In an unprecedented year with COVID, the team took great strides to make sure all of their test launches were going above and beyond accepted safety guidelines. “There's a lot of parts on board of a rocket, and getting all of them to work in harmony is not an easy task, especially when multiple people can’t work on the rocket all at once,” said team manager and logistics lead Alex Chen. “A lot of trial and error and revision was done. Iteration after iteration, we improved our design and methodology.”

 

Throughout both the marketing challenge and main event, Astral Orbit stumbled across multiple challenges that the team resolved in typical engineering fashion: “I knew that we had a compelling story to tell, but it was tough to find the way to best present a unified, authentic message. We had a day of interviews where people said whatever they wanted about TARC, but we realized that randomly interviewing a group of individuals wouldn't create a concise, unified message. We didn't realize this until about 24 hours before the video was due, and we hadn't edited it together yet. On the day it was due, Ark and I went out to record a bit of new footage to tie it all together. We got home, and Ark and Rusty quickly added in the new footage, cut it together, made the final touches, and submitted a compelling video less than an hour before the deadline,” team captain Ben said. Lead Editor and Engineer Aniruddh Kommareddy stated that "We had to reedit a whole section of the video in the last few hours in order better represent our team and the message we had to share." 

 

Astral Orbit also qualified for the main event national finals through a qualification flight score of 9, which was well within the cutoff score of 37.06. Ben noted that “For the main event, we were not fortunate enough to have an experienced mentor to guide us through the steps of learning rocketry, so we had to solve many difficult problems ourselves, including wind limits, parachute deployment, rocket fabrication, and in-flight stability. The team demonstrated an amazing ability to solve problems under pressure and fight until we succeeded.”

 

What is truly amazing is that all of these achievements came in Astral Orbit’s first season competing, making it only the first step in the right direction. Freshman and Coding Lead Jason Zhao says, “I feel very energized and excited for the years to come. We have so much room for improvement, and I really think we could get some big wins in the future.” 

 

You can view Astral Orbit’s winning video here: https://youtu.be/87ep7FlOuu8.

 

Visit the team’s website at: https://bit.ly/astralorbit. Follow and support the team on its journey: @realastralorbit on Twitter and Instagram! Questions? Contact realastralorbit@gmail.com.