Aviation Academy students get nod from NASA to build equipment for space station

When Will Sheets first sat down to assemble a locker for the International Space Station about four years ago, he had little more than a bin of parts that didn’t seem to belong together.

As a member of the class of 2016 at Denbigh High School’s Aviation Academy, based at Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport, he has worked on plenty of other aerospace projects. But he never had built something for NASA.

“It took me about two weeks to figure out how they all went together,” Sheets said. “Still didn’t fit.”

A few other students joined him that year in putting together the academy’s first locker for NASA’s HUNCH program, short for “High School Students United with NASA to Create Hardware.”

Now the program has grown to about 18 students and is about to take the next step. NASA has given the academy team the go-ahead to start building flight-ready lockers next school year.

These lockers actually will go into space.

Assuming they meet NASA’s quality standards, they’ll join a mission to the ISS. The lockers, which are roughly the size of a large kitchen drawer, can carry equipment for experiments or other supplies, shaped precisely to slide into existing racks on the space station.

They will be the only students in the country with the authorization to assemble lockers for space, taking over from a Texas high school that has assembled lockers the last few years.

The Aviation Academy team has been working for years to get to this level.

“That product is 100 times better than what it was last year,” said Neal Witherspoon, an aviation maintenance technician at the academy and the school’s HUNCH adviser.

George Kessler, HUNCH project manager, visited the academy Monday to meet the students behind the project.

Kessler said that NASA’s quality assurance engineers have been impressed with the work high school students have done. They also save NASA money — Witherspoon said that a contractor would charge about $50,000 for the lockers, while the raw materials students use cost closer to $5,000.

The lockers aren’t the only projects HUNCH administers. Others include the raw parts for the lockers and ISS handle bars. A team from Phoebus High School in Hampton won HUNCH’s annual culinary challenge this year with an organic harvest hash that will go to the ISS.

The standards the students have to meet are exacting. They have to use special techniques and be exceptionally precise, not leaving any gaps or snags that might catch on an astronaut’s glove or nick their hands.

Kessler brought with him a panel that will go on the ISS next school year for the students to sign. Even the marker they used to sign the panel had to meet certain standards and follow a strict procurement process.

“I almost want to become an astronaut just to go up there and be like, ‘Yo, that’s my signature right there!'” said Cesarine Aylsorth.

Aylsworth is a junior at the Aviation Academy who will keep working on the lockers next year. She joined the project at the recommendation of Witherspoon her sophomore year.

This year, she and the rest of the team managed to finish two lockers that meet standards that’ll be used at Johnson Space Center in Texas for training astronauts. That meant hours of after-school meetings planning next steps and carefully riveting titanium parts.

“You can’t start over on titanium,” Aylsworth said. “You start over with the measurements over and over again until you get it right. Then you do it.”

The experience has a lasting effect for graduates. Sheets said the hours spent piecing together lockers at the Aviation Academy helped more than anything else to put his future career into focus.

He is just finishing training as an aircraft maintenance technician. As part of his training, Sheets often had to work through complex problems without clear instructions, just like with the first locker.

“From freshman to junior year, (the Aviation Academy) really didn’t affect me much,” Sheets said. “But junior year, when I was starting on this project, it got me to realize that I wanted to do this as a career.”