On Friday, over twenty five Rocket Heroes from Wernher von Braun to Neil Armstrong to Elon Musk welcomed visitors to our Chemistry and Rocket Quest Exhibition.

We started with readings from the Eagles’ Flash Science Fiction stories and continued with a judging of space station, launchpad and rocket designs for the multi-billion dollar Space X contract, with points awarded for virtual drawings, electrical efficiency, scientific documentation and other categories.

Then it was time for the big event  – the final rocket launches, each featuring a top secret custom-engineered rocket fuel formula, designed to propel rockets as high as possible, with exactly a ten second safety delay and a completely neutral pH effluent.

Just as in the real world, some launches were flawless; others were less successful.  The crowd pulsed with ohhs and ahhs that would have made NASA proud, as some rockets soared over twenty five hundred feet (OK, in reality, twenty five feet.)

Most importantly, in the final Socratic discussion we listened to lessons learned from our open ended exploration of chemical reactions, from measuring PH to building better batteries to deep insights about the usefulness of scientific theory; carefully measured trial and error and random trial and error.  Most importantly, we heard of hard earned lessons about serving on and leading a team.

Next session – something even harder than rocket science.  How do you build better forms of government?