Story and photo by Doug Petrowski

High school students are always being urged to reach for new heights and to let their imaginations soar. In the Mountlake Terrace High School Rocketry club, they are doing just that.

“The students had a great learning year,” said Peter Schurke, MTHS Assistant Principal. Schurke, along with club faculty advisor Craig DeVine, led students in the school’s rocketry club in efforts to qualify for the 2013 Team America Rocketry Challenge, a high school competition that attracts hundreds of high school groups from throughout the country and around the world.

Teams of three to 10 students attempt to fly a model rocket 750 feet into the air for a flight of between 48 and 50 seconds while carrying a raw egg. The top 100 teams in the country to score flights closest to the required perimeters are invited to compete in a National Finals in May.

Mountlake Terrace High School had two teams of rocketry students attempting to qualify for the finals, but neither was successful.

“They had flights where they were very close on time, but not altitude, and flights where they were very close on altitude, but not time,” said Schurke. “They just couldn’t put it all together in one flight to nail that qualifying score that would have put them through.”

The two MTHS rocketry teams were the only students from Snohomish County to attempt the national qualifying, and one of only 15 schools in the state in the TARC program. Only two Washington state high school rocketry teams qualified for the National Final — Skyline High School Team 2 from Sammamish, and Northwest Yeshiva High School Team 1 from Mercer Island.

“I’m very proud of all the hard work they put in and of how far they’ve come this year,” Schurke said. “They’ll be a serious threat to make it to nationals next year.”

The Team America Rocketry Challenge is co-sponsored by the National Association of Rocketry, an organization of almost 100,000 model rocket enthusiasts nationwide.