A 2025–2026 season recap from the Gunston Science and Engineering Club
 

— Dr. Ken Wilson
 

This year's rocketry program closed out its most productive season on record. Across the winter and spring work days, the team logged roughly 24 launches, regularly drew a dozen or more students into the physics lab on weekends, and put a rocket in the hands of every single novice — more rockets and more launches than the program has ever managed before.

Gunston competes each year in the American Rocketry Challenge (ARC), the largest student rocket contest in the country. In past years the club fielded four competition teams. This season we tried something different: two competition teams and two novice teams. The two ARC competition teams — team 76 and team 75 — each focused on designing, building, and refining a single contest rocket. The two novice teams took a different path, working through a progression of kits that climbed in difficulty from simple beginner models up to multistage rockets and, eventually, their own designs. The goal was to keep newcomers engaged across the whole season while training the ARC competitors of the future, and it paid off in turnout.

The ARC challenge is unforgiving on the numbers. Each team's rocket has to carry one large hen egg to an altitude of 750 feet, stay airborne for between 36 and 39 seconds, and bring the egg back to the ground unbroken under parachute, with every part tethered together through landing. On top of that, the rocket must weigh no more than 650 grams at liftoff, measure at least 650 millimeters long, and use a single constant body-tube diameter of 47 millimeters or greater from nose to tail. Hitting all of those targets at once is the real engineering problem — and this year both competition teams built rockets to those specs, ready to make their first flights at the season's final launch.

Novice students learned construction technique and the principles of aerodynamic stability hands-on, advancing kit by kit through models of increasing complexity. By the end of the season every novice had built and flown a rocket of their own — the clearest sign that the new structure did its job.

A Final Launch at the Central Sod Farm

The big Maryland Delaware Rocketry Association (MDRA) Red Glare Rocket Festival was canceled this year. In its place, MDRA held a smaller launch at the Central Sod Farm — minutes from Gunston — on Sunday, April 26, giving the program a final outing to fly the ARC competition rockets and anything else that was ready. Taking part that day: Eamon Schopfer ’26, Connor Joyce ’26, Aiden Filer ’26, Ben Joyce ’29, Sasha Wilson ’29, Kaitlyn Joyce ’29, Zac Hatch ’27, Joey McGeady ’27 and Brody Schultz ’29 — along with the many parents who came out to support the event.

The season's rockets were the work of:

• Rocketry Tsar: Eamon Schopfer ’26
• ARC team leaders: Connor Joyce ’26, Aiden Filer ’26
• Novice team leaders: AJ Friedrich ’27, Ben Watkins ’28
• Rocket builders: Ben Joyce ’29, Sasha Wilson, ’29 Kaitlyn Joyce ’29, Zac Hatch ’27, Joey McGeady, ’27 Brody Schultz ’29, Andrew Shingledecker ’27, Ben Perez ’29, Ethan Paniere, ’27 Atticus Forloney, ’29 Leo Forloney ’29, Kasiah Telligman ’29, Denis Hein ’26, Maggie Lindsay ’29, and Blake Algier ’26.

A Special Thanks…

This program runs on the people behind it. Thank you to the parents who shuttled students to and from Gunston throughout the season — the program simply could not exist without you. A big thank-you to Rocketry Tsar Eamon Schopfer and the team leaders — Connor Joyce, Aiden Filer, AJ Friedrich, and Ben Watkins — who mentored the novices and kept work days moving. And a final thank-you to Mr. Ryan Redding, who co-chaperoned and co-mentored alongside the program throughout the year. A lot of new students joined this year, on the heels of a strong robotics turnout. With an earlier start next season, there's every reason to expect the program to grow again.