Northwest Indian College Team Selected for NASA Student Rocket Launch

Feb 6, 2012 | Archives, Blog

Congratulations to Team SkyWalkers, Northwest Indian College’s (NWIC) team that will be part of this year’s NASA Student Launch Initiative April 21 near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. NWIC’s team was one of 42 nationwide selected to participate in the program this year.

Team SkyWalkers is comprised of more than 12 students from five tribes ranging from age 19 to 58 and advised by NWIC faculty member Gary Brandt, who has taught the sciences, electronics, and robotics at NWIC since 1989.

NWIC tribal college students and American Indian College Fund scholarship recipients Paul Ballew (Lummi), a second-year computer information science major and Buffy Towle (Lummi), a Native Environmental Science major, were interviewed about how their rocket works and their team’s strategy for designing their rocket to meet NASA requirements to collect, measure and analyze data in the experiment by This Week from Indian Country.

The American Indian College Fund is queuing up Elton John’s song “Rocket Man” in Team SkyWalkers honor and wishing them the best of luck in April. You can read the team’s reports about their project and watch launch
videos on their blog.

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