In June, students from Tesla STEM High School near Redmond will test their engineering skills against college and university students from around the world when they compete in the Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC).

The competition, put on by the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association (ESRA), is in its 10th year and will be in Utah.

Students entering the competition are part of an internship program at STEM — a Lake Washington School District (LWSD) choice school that accepts students from Redmond, Kirkland and Sammamish — through a partnership with Aerojet Rocketdyne in Redmond. The program is comprised of about 40 students (all seniors, with one junior as students are required to be enrolled in the advanced physics class at STEM). They are working with about 8-9 professional mentors with a variety of expertise in the aerospace industry. Most of the mentors work at Aerojet Rocketdyne.

The internship was started about a year ago by Charles Sota, business development manager for Aerojet Rocketdyne, who had begun to build a rocket as a senior design project in college.

“We never got to launch it,” he said.

After the rocket sat in his garage for a few decades, Sota decided to do something with it once his son enrolled at STEM last year. Sota reached out to the school and connected with Peter Saxby, who became the program’s faculty adviser, to start the internship. The goal was for students to use Sota’s rocket and update it to enter in the competition.

For Sota, working with the teens has been great.

“Gives me hope for the future,” he said about the experience.

He said his favorite part has been just working with all of the students and learning from them.

Senior and project manager Pauline Pfaffe, said the program is divided into six smaller groups of 7-8 students. Each group specializes in one subsystem of the rocket. She said there is even one group dedicated to working out all the math involved in designing and building the rocket.

The group, which meets once a week after school and occasionally on Saturdays, recently took their rocket to the Fire Training Academy in North Bend for its third hot fire test to make sure the rocket’s flow, chemical combustion and thrust is correct.

The rocket, which they have named Lawn Dart, is just under 9 feet tall and about 55 pounds.

One feature that will set Lawn Dart apart from its competitors is that the students are designing it to run on two liquid fuels rather than motor fuels or a hybrid of the two, said senior Ethan Perrin. The senior said this adds complexity to the rocket as well as a performance boost. This component also creates a greater design challenge.

“We’re trying to be the first,” Perrin said about IREC competitors using solely liquid fuels for their designs.

For some of the students involved in the program, experience and knowledge of aerospace and rockets was not something they brought to the table prior to joining the internship.

Pfaffe said the program sounded exciting and interesting. Senior Suraj Buddhavarapu viewed it as a design challenge. And senior Theodor Johansson thought he would enjoy the experience.

“It sounds fun,” he said about the program.

The group’s inexperience is a quality that will set the students apart from their competitors as they will be the only high schoolers to be competing in IREC. But their lack of experience is not going to stop them from giving it their all.

“We want to show (other competitors) we can beat them at what they can do — or what they can’t do,” Pfaffe said.

She believes they are just as capable of doing what college students can. There is no reason high school students shouldn’t be able to, she said.

Despite this confidence, the project has not come without challenges.

Pfaffe said some of the main challenges they have encountered have had to do with calculating the angles for Lawn Dart’s trajectory, which need to be very specific. They have also had to factor in a competition-required 10-pound payload into the rocket.

And one of the biggest challenges has been the cost.

“It’s expensive,” Pfaffe said.

In addition to the cost to build the rocket itself, there is the cost of having to transport it and as many students who are able to go halfway across the country for the competition. Pfaffe said they will be driving to Utah come June, as they wouldn’t be able to take the rocket onto a plane.

To help raise money for the trip, the students have started an online crowdfunding site. For more information or to donate, visit www.gofundme.com/lawndart.

The group needs to raise $9,000 to help with expenses, which include rocket building and travel to the competition. As of Wednesday, they had raised $1,431.