Raider III

16 Sep 2020

Kaiserslautern High School’s National Technical Honor Society (NTHS) took on a new challenge last year and has not looked back since. We wanted an exciting STEAM project that had meaning and purpose, and truly challenged students to reach their full potential. Project Horizon met all our expectations and more.

On 2 June, 2019, the Project Horizon team launched their first High Altitude Balloon (HAB) into near space, 110,000 feet above earth. This first “Proof of Concept” flight was a result of eight months of preparation. Students explored atmospheric phenomenon and developed insightful experiments that could only be carried out in high altitudes.

The Project Horizon team is currently preparing for our third launch, the Raider III, which will be similar to our first two launches but with new and more exciting experiments.

For our third launch, we hope to try something new. We hope to extend our knowledge of High Altitude Ballooning into local elementary and middle schools, and make our program accessible to similar organizations at other high schools. We believe that all students have an innate interest in space, and that we can capture that interest through our HAB program.

We would like to offer local middle and elementary schools the opportunity to work with our team and develop their own experiments that we will place into near space. Our school partnership team would consist of an Air Force Association mentor, plus two or three KHS Project Horizon team members. The function of this partnership team would be to help educate, develop and fund a variety of atmospheric science experiments that would collectively fit into one Styrofoam pod. Our Raider III mission is currently targeted for mid-May and will consist of four school specific pods.

We will also publish a website with instructions to guide other high schools in creating their own programs and designing and carrying out their own near space experiments.

Should your school like to participate in our Project Horizon Partnership Program, please contact Ken Robinson for more information at ken.robinson@dodea.edu.

Respectfully,

Your KHS Project Horizon HAB team