LAKELAND, Fla. (WFLA) – A group of six high school students from the Central Florida Aerospace Academy is heading for the stratosphere— literally.
The students are the only team in the state of Florida selected to participate in NASA’s TechRise Student Challenge, a national competition that gives young innovators the opportunity to design, build, and launch an experiment into the upper atmosphere.
Their project? A small, hand-built experiment designed to test how different types of 3D-printed plastic materials hold up against radiation nearly 70,000 feet above Earth.
“This is the project right here,” said Joshua Johnson, one of the students on the design-build team, holding up a small box. “It’s quite a small box, but this is kind of the meat of where our project is.”
The team learned in January that their idea had been selected. Camille Foreman, the project lead, remembers the moment clearly…