Last month, everyone helped to lift Liam, a lanky member of the team, to a dense aspen tree to retrieve a wayward rocket that was stuck at 35 ft. He gradually made his way up and used a fishing rod to pry the tangled parachute off the branches. A lot had happened before a group of a dozen kids ended up in a windy cornfield north of Boston.

For four years, I was on MIT Lincoln Lab’s Team America Rocketry Challenge team, two as the captain. A nationwide competition, TARC focuses on designing, simulating, building, and testing rockets to meet specific mission objectives (e.g., apex, flight time, payload retrieval).

To share my enthusiasm for rocketry, I established a TARC team at my school during the junior year. A lot of convincing and collaboration