About Us

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The idea for the Big Blue Boom Crew was born when our founding member, Ishaan, saw a rocket launch from Kennedy Space Center in the Spring of 2023 and thought, "Wow, that was incredible! I wonder if we could pull something like that off at Anover?" After reaching out to a few friends with the same shared interest, the club was born.

We weren't even sure if it was possible at first: "A club using explosives on campus at a high school? Who would approve that?" So we worked to push away any of that doubt. We established safety protocols, met with the director of the Makerspace, the head of Campus Safety, and had meetings with the school Physics Department. By the end of the 2023 school year we found Dr. Zorrilla, an amazing club advisor. Things were looking good, now it was time to search for funding.

After many meetings and countless nights of budget-making, the board members of the club applied for a grant of $2509.88 from the Abbot Academy Fund. We shared our proposal pitch at the AAF's grant dinner night and marketed our idea as best we could. After about a month of waiting we got our answer: a yes! Boom Crew now had enough funding for the 2023-24 competition season!

We started work on the rockets right away. We soon built up a solid club base and began weekly build meetings. We learned how to use softwares such as OpenRocket and began cutting body tubes and measuring out shock cords. Ms. Chavarria, the Makerspace Coordinator, was a huge help in this process. After about a month and a half we had fully function rocket and were ready for launch!

Our first launch didn't go so amazing, to say the least. We hit an apogee of almost 300 feet lower than our goal. While these results were disappointing, we sure learned a lot from them. We learned about using different parachute sizes, stronger engines, better aligned fins, and much more. We also found out that launching at school was no longer an option when one of our rockets unfortunately hit a teacher's house.

Jim Salem from the NAR connected us with the Central Massachusetts Spacemodeling Society or CMASS, through which we would conduct future launches. Over the next few weeks we would work tirelessly on refining our rocket and getting it ready for higher more-powerful launches. In all, we had four launches, learning more about the competition and the art of rocketry with each one!

By the end of our fourth testing day we were doing great. Now all that was left to do was hear back from the challenge about whether or not we qualified for Nationals. On that fateful April day, we all received the email: we made it! It was now time to prep the rocket, but more importantly, we had a lot of logistics to figure out.

We met with countless people: the Dean of Students, Cluster Deans, advisors, teachers, Makerspace Coordinators, and did a whole lot of emailing. We met for hours trying to plan out every detail of the trip. We associated with the nonprofit Brickyard Collaborative Inc., and moved onto Nationals.

Finally, Nationals weekend was here, and we were on a train to Washington, DC. Our launch went smoothly, and we learned a lot from other, more experienced teams such as  cylindrical fin designs and new methods of mounting the rocket on the launch rail. We ended up placing 53rd at Nationals, placing us in the top 6% of all teams in the US. An incredible achievement for a team in their first year!