JOY LEWIS / Monitor staff

Christopher Kibler (left), 17, removes the nose cone and payload bay from the booster, held by Thomas Zervos, 13, yesterday as Weare Middle School science teacher Mark Kibler (right) discusses plans for his rocketry team, made up of middle and high school students, to launch the rocket in Nevada in September.

By RAY DUCKLER
Monitor columnist

Eight local students, most from the Weare area, have higher goals than most. Potentially nine miles high, in fact.

They're part of a nationally recognized rocketry team run by Dunbarton's Mark Kibler, a science teacher at Weare Middle School who opened this world of power and flight to middle and high school students.

Stanford University took notice. The prestigious institution gave Kibler and his mini space cadets a $2,500 grant to build a scientific payload that will be loaded into a 9½-foot rocket in Nevada's Black Rock Desert in September.

If all goes as planned, the Air Sampling Probe, or ASP, will fly perhaps 50,000 feet in the air, then gently float to the ground via parachute, collecting data such as greenhouse gas concentration, humidity and temperature along the way.

Others receiving grants? Mental midgets like the Stanford University and University of Montana Aerospace Engineering Departments, and two teams from Japan.

"And us, a handful of kids from rural New Hampshire," Kibler said. "It's kind of exciting."

Kibler, a 54-year-old bespectacled man with a silver mustache, finished first in his eighth-grade science fair in Ohio. He says as a kid he went from picking up arrowheads in farm fields, to using metal detectors, to building model rockets.

"I might have been the stereotypical science geek," Kibler concedes.

He's been teaching science at Weare Middle School for 11 years. He taught his students about robotics for five years before moving to rockets. Four years ago, his rocket scientists signed up for the Team America Rocketry Challenge, a contest open to teams from the United States and Canada.

They had to launch a rocket containing an astronaut, in this case an egg, 800 feet into the air in a specified time frame, without, of course, cracking the egg. Precision and accuracy meant everything.

The top 20 teams sent a proposal, a blueprint for a rocket, to NASA, and the top 10 winners got to launch their rocket, one mile up, from the Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Team Kibler made the final 10 in each of the past two years, led by captains Tyler Becker and Mollie Dowst. Both are now juniors at John Stark Regional High School.

Professors from Stanford and other institutions out west, such as the Association of Experimental Rocketry of the Pacific (Aeropac), noticed that a bunch of New Hampshire students from towns called Weare and Dunbarton and Hill had earned the right to be challenged further, at a learning factory in a Nevada desert.

"They knew about us before we knew about them," Kibler said. "It was a network of important people in the loop, so, yeah, it was surprising when they contacted us."

The weeklong series of launches will be held in the Black Rock Desert, 100 miles north of Reno. It's billed as the flattest piece of land on earth.

"We just started a few years ago by launching a rocket to 800 feet," Becker said, "and now we're talking about maybe 50,000 feet."

Kibler and his crew have met at Kibler's Dunbarton home three times, including yesterday for a three-hour session.

They are Becker and Dowst; their input and leadership skills were obvious throughout the meeting. Dowst sat in the corner of Kibler's living room, logging the minutes on her laptop.

They are also Jessica Chapman and Sean Doherty and Chris Kibler and Andrew Mahn and Anna McGuire and Tom Zervos, junior high and high school students with curious natures and big dreams.

And they are Kibler's big black retriever, Bandit, also known as the Rocket Dog. They sat around on a rainy afternoon and discussed altitude and corrupt data and heat and booster engines.

And they passed around the ASP, a small rectangular computer and the heartbeat of the entire project. It'll be rigged to a wooden structure called the Pod, which will also contain the Beast, an orange transmitter that will lead the team to the ASP after it lands somewhere in the desert. It could end up miles from the launch site.

This is the payload that Team Kibler has created, based on detailed specifications. Aeropac provides the motor and rocket, which will be 6 inches in diameter and more than two feet taller than Shaquille O'Neal.

"There's so much time and effort and a lot of expectations and hopes riding on it," Dowst said. "So then when you finally launch it, I'm pretty sure it's going to work, but you have to keep your fingers crossed. There's always that factor of what if; what if this happens or what if something goes wrong. Things happen that you could never have predicted."

Perhaps the parachute will tangle in the fins. Or maybe the ejection charge, which separates the payload from the rocket's booster, will malfunction.

An exact replica of the rocket stood in Kibler's sunroom, which has a high ceiling. It was tested recently in Amesbury, Mass., home of the Central Massachusetts Aerospace Modeling Society, Kibler's rocket club. It traveled 1,500 feet. All went well.

The real test comes in September. The desert will be hot, the wind potentially fierce. Team Kibler must decide what size engine to use, based on factors such as remaining available funding and payload weight, so altitude is yet to be determined. The crater left behind in the sand will be big, maybe 4 feet across.

"I'd like to go 50,000 feet," Kibler said. "I'd like to go as high as we can."