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The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
When Brigham Young University student Zach Lawless was a little boy, he had one dream: to become an astronaut.
“I hit 6-foot, and then I kept growing to 6-foot-6,” Lawless told the Deseret News. “I obviously don’t fit into spaceships anymore, so I thought the next best thing was become an engineer and build rockets.”
Although his first dream was dashed, Lawless, along with three other members of the BYU Rocketry team — Riley Meik, Alex Laraway and Mark Johnson — realized a new dream last week by setting a new Guinness World Records title for highest launch of an Alka-Rocket in the 2018 Bayer Alka-Rocket Challenge in Florida.
Lawless, Meik, Laraway and Johnson are members of BYU’s high-altitude team where they specialize in building amateur, high-powered rockets. But, according to Lawless, one problem they kept running into was lack of funding.
“One of our members came across this competition that was hosted by Bayer and he’s like, ‘You know, there’s a $30,000 prize that I’m pretty sure we can win because we’ve been doing rockets … forever,’ and so we decided to enter. We used a lot of our rocketry skills from building high-power rockets to build a rocket that … won,” Lawless said.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
