The Bridgewater-Raritan High School recently saw the creation of a new STEM-related club: BR Aerospace.

The club, which currently has around 10-15 members, is led by a group of four officers, each considered a co-founder: Jason Stimpfle, Peter Shan, Fisayo Ogunsulire and Arjun Agarwala. All officers are sophomores and the member pool consists almost entirely of sophomores and freshmen.

The central focus of the club is to participate in the American Rocketry Challenge (ARC). According to the ARC website, “The American Rocketry Challenge is the world’s largest rocket contest, with nearly 5,000 students nationwide competing each year. The contest gives middle and high school students the opportunity to design, build and launch model rockets and hands-on experience solving engineering problems.”

As part of the competition, participating teams of up to 10 people will build rockets according to specifications that change every year. The goal is to attain a maximum altitude as close as possible to the yearly height while safely carrying a payload of one egg without letting it be damaged.

According to the officers, “the ARC offers a fun, problem-solving challenge.” They also added that the overall impact of the club will “propel its members into renowned aerospace engineering programs, or perhaps other STEM fields.”

BR Aerospace currently has two teams registered for the competition and both have started the design process for their rockets. The rockets will be designed using a software known as OpenRocket, designed specifically for the ARC. Once the design is done, teams will have to buy parts and components to assemble the rocket, which the club hopes to finish by early February.

The first part of the competition, the qualification round, will need to be completed by early April. During this round, teams will send videos of their rocket launches to qualify.

Jason Stimpfle, who initially created the concept of the club, shared his hopes for the future of the club and students’ experiences.

“BR Aerospace is still very much in its infancy. As you could expect, we’re all quite inexperienced when it comes to building meter-long rockets, but we’re learning and improving every day,” Simpfle said. “As time passes, we intend to grow BR Aerospace from a club into a model rocketry program capable of seriously contending nationally every year. I think with time we’ll be more than capable of it.”