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Their first frontier At MIT, girls are learning to build rockets in a program that could serve as a launching pad for careers in science By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff, 2/4/2003
As the country began asking what went wrong in the skies over Texas, these girls tried to regain their focus on what is possible within their own lives. They carefully attached balsa-wood fins to cardboard tubes serving as rocket bodies. They tested parachutes, checked the placement of plastic nose cones, and pondered the effect of such flight variables as wind and weight. ''Before, when anybody would say `rocket science,' I would think I'm not smart enough,'' said Rachel O'Sullivan, 13, of Cambridge. ''But Peter says: `Step by step.' '' Peter is MIT senior lecturer Peter W. Young, a retired Air Force colonel whose 29-year career included stints on launch teams for shuttle missions. Over the past several months, Young has guided members of the Science Club for Girls, all residents of Cambridge or Somerville, as they've assembled rockets from scratch. Their biggest challenge lies ahead: On Feb. 16, they will take part in a test launch, part of a nationwide competition, with the goal of transporting two eggs and an electronic altimeter 1,500 feet into the sky. This past Saturday morning session, of course, proved to be like none of the others. News broke of the shuttle disaster just as they arrived at MIT. While they worked on their miniature rockets, a radio crackled with updates of the terrible news involving a real spacecraft. ''Being here, working on rockets, you think about it,'' said Melinda Barbosa, 17, of Somerville. The girls listened with solemn faces as Young explained how a loss of shuttle tiles might have led to a ''burn-through.'' ''Finding any data is going be really, really hard,'' he said. ''One of the obvious effects is we're not going to launch another shuttle until all this is cleared up.''
The girls nodded, then returned to their lab tables. They were shaken, but they had a deadline to meet. At one table, Barbosa worked with Jerusalem Tasew, 16, and twin sisters Sarah and Martha Gebrekristos, 18. Tasew glanced dubiously at the fins. ''These wings are bent to death,'' she said. But after Barbosa carefully trimmed a fin with an X-Acto knife, and Sarah Gebrekristos sanded the fin down a bit further, Tasew pronounced: ''Now, it's good.'' The Science Club for Girls, which boasts 150 members from kindergarten through 12th grade, was founded nine years ago by a group of Cambridge parents. They launched the club in response to a nationwide study that found that as girls reached adolescence, their self-esteem dropped along with their interest in science and math. The study found that girls received less encouragement than boys when it came to science and math, and that girls were far more likely than boys to say they were ''not smart enough'' for careers in those fields. The girls who volunteered for the rocketry project do not appear to feel any such inhibitions. ''Girls are more into science than before,'' Barbosa said. But after discussing technical design and tackling the problem-solving challenges the project poses each session, there is no question they are different students than they were at the beginning of the school year. ''I feel a lot more confident in class,'' said Annie Pettibone, 14, of Cambridge. ''I liked science, but now I feel like I understand it more.'' The force behind all of this is the low-key Young, who graduated from MIT in 1967, when less than 10 percent of his classmates were women. Last fall, convinced he could ''merge theory and practice'' in a way that would appeal to girls, he approached Mary Memmott, program director of the Science Club for Girls, with an idea for a rocketry project. Since October, assisted by MIT students, he has held seven sessions with the teenagers. Their goal is to make the finals of the national Team America Rocketry Challenge, organized by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Association of Rocketry, and supported by NASA. As many as 800 teams are competing nationwide; the top five teams will split a prize of $59,000. Moreover, the top 10 teams will compete for grants to design and launch a rocket at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Wherever they end up in the competition, the students are experiencing something that is increasingly rare in schools: a hands-on project. ''I don't hesitate to ask him a question, because he explains it in a way that makes it clear,'' Tasew said. Memmott, who saw the gender gap firsthand as a science teacher, is impressed by the effect Young has had on his charges. ''Before, they didn't have any idea about aeronautics, but now they see themselves as aeronautic engineers,'' she said. On Saturday, Young moved among the girls, offering advice and encouragement as they squinted at their handiwork. ''I'm worried about our fins not being right,'' fretted Maggie Long, 14, of Cambridge. ''The only problem is you don't know what will happen in flight.'' She turned to Young and asked teasingly, ''Are you going to be my scapegoat, so if this goes wrong I can blame you?'' Young grinned and replied: ''You're doing very well.'' They all are, in Young's eyes. ''They're sharp, they're eager, they want to be there, they work well together, they take instruction well, they ask questions,'' he said. ''As an educator, I'm in heaven.'' There were times Saturday when the students, for all their misgivings and questions, appeared to be in the same state of bliss. At one point, Long looked around at the rockets steadily taking shape on three different lab tables. ''Wonderful things, aren't they?'' she said. Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.
This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 2/4/2003.
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AMBRIDGE -- It was an hour after catastrophe struck the space shuttle Columbia. Inside MIT's Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, the talk was of booster stages and payloads and onboard altimeters. Nothing surprising about technical space talk in that setting, except the people doing the talking Saturday morning were nine middle- and high-school girls who were laboring over several miniature rockets in various stages of assembly.
