Ridgeview Middle School students are taking to the sky as students were selected to have their experiments flown on a NASA sounding rocket or a high altitude research balloon this summer as part of the Cubes in Space Program.

Fourteen students total were selected with ten  students having their experiments flown on the NASA sounding rocket in June, and four students selected to have their experiments flown on a high altitude research balloon in August.

The Cubes in Space program gives middle and high school students the opportunity to learn about rocket science and use that knowledge to design experiments to test how those forces acted on different materials. Students and campuses then have the opportunity to submit experiments for consideration to be launched or flown. They are selected based on their incorporation of learned information, creativity, and efficiency.

Experiments selected to be launched in June:

  • Ojas Phirke and Max Wulff, eighth grade, The Reaction from Different Chewing Gum under the Forces Experienced During Spaceflight,
  • Debbie Bong and Leyre Parra, seventh and eighth grade, The effects of space’s unique forces on the properties of bismuth,
  • Ana Taveira and Adam Markus, eighth grade, Space Kiln,
  • Faith Nguyen and Raymond Vu, eighth grade, The Effect of Space Conditions on Methods of Preserving Food, and,
  • Ethan Do and Ian Douglass, eighth grade, The Measure of The Breaking Point of Cost-Efficient Rope in Space.

Students selected to have experiments flown in August:

  • Alan Tong and Helen Truong, eighth grade, and
  • Braylon Hill, Ryan Prendeville, seventh grade.

For the sounding rocket launch category, out of 33 schools with experiments chosen, Ridgeview was one of two in Texas and had a total of five  experiments selected. Other schools selected represented the United States, Vietnam, Canada, Hong Kong, Columbia, Bahrain, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil and Australia.

Only 80 experiments were chosen for the program out of over 700 entries.

Students will have their experiments shipped to Colorado for inspection, then to NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. They’ll launch on a Terrior-Improved Orion Sounding Rocket on June 21.

The rocket the experiments will fly on will go approximately 93 miles high and splash down in the Atlantic Ocean about 16 minutes after take off. The experiment chamber will be recovered and sent back to campus so students can collect data and see the results.

For the high altitude research balloon flight, experiments will fly for between five  and 15 hours and about 23 miles above the earth’s surface in August.