The
HISTORIC FINISH
Tiger HI-LINE
Friday, Oct 12, 2018
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Volume 58 Edition 4
S.T.A.R.S rocket club launches new NASA project
On April 6, 2019, the Cedar Falls High School “S.T.A.R.S” rocket club will be finally shooting off their rocket “Valkyrie” and bringing it back to the home base “Valhalla” at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Student Launch exploration conference in Huntsville, Ala. “This year our project is called Valhalla, and it comes from Norse mythology. The rocket is named Valkyrie. In Norse mythology you have Valhalla, which is the vikings’ heaven, and Valkyries are angels that take vikings that have died in combat to Valhalla,” junior rocket club member Austin Cross said. “That was our original plan, to bring the rocket back down. We are leading our rocket back down to our launch pad, Valhalla [heaven],” he said. To get to the official launch date and demonstrate their final proposal and design to NASA, the 14 students in the club and their mentors will put in a year’s worth of hard work. “These students have to raise $10,0000 to $12,000 a year and have to prove their work to NASA scientists. It gives them
Top left, TJ Tomlyanovich, Frank Zhang, Benson Redfern, Calvin Timmer, Ducan Meyer, Andrew Mord, Siddhartha Kalala, Andre Bryan. Below from left, Nathan Hoffman, Taylor Hanson, Marika Yang, Austin Cross, Erik Walther, and Randev Goonesekere.
a really good job experience,” rocket club mentor Zeb Nicholson said. Nicholson is a former CFHS teacher and currently a mechanical engineer at Doerfer. On the team, the five subgroups—payload design, vehicle design, outreach, fundraising and safety collectively—get the tasks done to prep the building of the rocket. “The build process will take us from now to February. We won’t actually get the green light to build until early November,” Nicholson said. Another report will be written to the NASA launch board with
every detail so they can get their next signal to build. “What it is is the exact process to go through to build a real rocket. Every step that NASA does, we do on a smaller scale,” Nicholson said. For the rocket club, this year’s proposal was accepted by NASA, and their first “go ahead” for their plan was approved on Oct. 4. “We feel like this year’s proposal was an extension of last year’s regarding the content and improving it with adding more or less in different areas. Students were able to take the proposal form last year and learn from
it and challenge themselves,” Nicholson said. This year, the club has proposed a new idea for their rocket. “I am really excited to show our idea that we proposed. It is about parafoils, which was kind of a big deal, so I am excited for us to expand on it,” outreach group leader senior Marika Yang said. “A parafoil is what parachutes have to guide it when you pull on it, but it is automated so the rocket will be more advanced,” she said. As new designs are being introduced, failure is a factor that the students try to eliminate to the smallest percentage possible. “We have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen, but in the proposal we write for the rocket launch, one of the titled pages is just what could go wrong during the launch, what can break, really anything that will go wrong, but we try to prevent that,” Cross said. With recent budget cuts of $561 million for NASA, the competition was made smaller and more intense, cutting down the competing high schools for this year’s student launch from 14 to
just seven. “The competition is going to be interesting this year. It is a little more narrowed down because some of NASA’s funds got cut and there are high school teams as well as college teams,” Cross said. Despite the narrowed competition for the 2019 student launch, the S.T.A.R.S received praise from NASA for their advanced parafoil proposal. Last year, the team swept the top awards. “Last year we got two of the highest awards out of the seven given and were named the highest high school team,” co-leader of the rocket club senior Erik Walther said. “When the rocket launch has finally happened, it is a sigh of relief because of all the hard work we have put into it. Last year we had some troubles with some of our launches,” Walther said. “Last year we had six students, but this year we have 14, so this year we have a lot stronger team, and I think we can do really well.”
sport practices and being in music like band and orchestra keeps me from getting to sleep. Both of those classes are stressful and require you to practice a lot instead of working on homework. Plus at the end of the day, you need to wind down and watch an episode of ‘The Office,’ which takes about another 30 minutes.” In fact, many of the Tiger Hi-Line survey respondents said that being on social media and Netflix plays a large role in what time they get to bed. The National Sleep Foundation reported that the blue light given off by cell phones restrains the production of melatonin in one’s brain, making it harder to fall asleep, and most teens are noticing the consequences. The Tiger Hi-Line survey also found that 86.1 percent are stressed out by school. One respondent said that paying atten-
tion during school can be hard while juggling so many other activities. “With getting less sleep due to the work at school and outside activities, waking up early and needing to get to school (maybe even earlier than normal due to extracurriculars) make it difficult to learn and absorb information because when you are tired, you can’t learn as easily or effectively.” Another survey respondent said that lack of sleep isn’t the only part of school that stresses him or her out. “I think it’s more of every teacher expects so much from you when they need to realize that many kids are involved in other actives. Also, standard-based grading stresses me out so much ’cause I’m not even aware of my grade, so I’m constantly emailing teachers instead of studying.” By Staff Writer Erin
By Co-Editor-In-Chief Sabine
MARTIN
Survey shows students sacrificing sleep over school, jobs
A Hi-Line Poll shows that while juggling school, sports, homework, work and other extracurricular activities, teens are often pushing sleep down to the end on the list of their priorities as they face each day without the rest their bodies crave. The survey of 173 students found 85.5 percent say they are tired during school, and students in Cedar Falls are not alone. According to the National Sleep Foundation, only 15 percent of teenagers reported getting at least 8.5 hours of sleep per night, but eight to 10 hours of sleep are required for a healthy lifestyle. Failure to do this can result in increased difficulty while learning and concentrating, and may even make teenagers more prone to acne. Lost sleep also hinders one’s ability to solve problems, which is a vital part of every school day. There are a multitude of
Yes
No
Erin McRae Graphic reasons why sleep is put on the backburner for many adolescents. One of the respondents on the survey said that, “I don’t get to sleep early enough because of the overload of homework and studying coupled with the fact that I want to have a life
outside of school and spend some time with my family before I head off to college,” the respondent said. One sophomore chalked up the lack of sleep to both a busy schedule and a desire to be a normal teenager. “Homework,
MCRAE