A student rocketry team climbs to the top of the US competition despite losing an engine in the post
A slow delivery nearly dashed the hopes of some high-flying rocket students from Bellevue, Wash., over the weekend. But a last-minute scramble to buy a car saved the day and secured a strong result for the Washington state teams in the 2026 National Finals of the American Rocketry Challenge.
Washington Youth Aerospace, a team based in Redmond, Wash. made up of ninth-graders from Bellevue’s Interlake High School, finished second in the annual competition in The Plains, Va., on Saturday. In the finals there were 100 teams from a pool of 1,107 teams competing in this challenge as a whole.
Washington was represented by 11 teams, including eight from the Eastside of the Seattle area. Four of those teams finished in the top ten.
The competition features middle school and high school students tasked with designing, building, and launching model rockets. The goal is to encourage students to pursue aerospace and STEM careers.
Washington Youth Aerospace earned $15,000 for finishing second — an impressive showing after the team was in danger of not even being able to launch their rocket.
Because of the dangerous nature of rocket engines, they had to be sent by ground transportation from coast to coast.
“We sent it about two-and-a-half weeks back,” said Sudheer Sirivara, parent advisor and team manager. “We were tracking it and somewhere it went missing within a week.”
The engines arrived in New Jersey on Thursday and were tracked to Philadelphia on Friday. Sirivara and the team were searching the Washington, DC, area for the engine that provided the information the team had planned. The vendor on site was a hero before the event on Saturday.
“He spent about 25 minutes searching, and inside his truck was one box containing the car we need,” said Sirivara, adding that the team’s original engines were finally delivered by the Postal Service – two days after the event ended.
The Washington Youth Aerospace team consists of students Mikhail Antipin, Anay Mediwala, Nikhil Sirivara, Daniel Tadesse, Bao-Ky Tran, and Antoine Vigneron.
Sirivara said their rocket success started with the good advice they received from teachers while at Bellevue’s Odle Middle School. Senior VP at Warner Bros. A Discovery and Microsoft veteran, he also praised the concentration of tech and engineering parents on the Eastside at companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others.
Good data collection doesn’t hurt either.
“You need to fire a lot of rockets to collect enough data to see how your rocket performs in different wind conditions, weather conditions, temperatures,” Sirivara said.
In the final, the teams scored twice. They needed to hit a target altitude of 730 meters for the first launch and 725 meters for the second. The rockets must stay in the air for between 36 and 39 seconds, and return to the ground safely with their cargo intact – the egg.
Bishop’s School of La Jolla, Calif., took first place in the challenge and will represent the US in the international finals — an event where Bellevue’s Newport High School finished second a few years ago.
Here are the final standings of Washington’s teams in the national finals:
- 2nd – Washington Youth Aerospace, Redmond
- 4th – Interlake High School (Team 1), Bellevue
- 6th – Newport High School (Team 2), Bellevue
- 7th – Odle Middle School, Bellevue
- 12th – Newport High School (Team 1), Bellevue
- 19th – Interlake High School (Team 2), Bellevue
- 33rd – Annie Wright Schools, Tacoma
- 38th – Tyee Middle School, Bellevue
- 69th – SmilingTree, Sammamish
- 89th – Sustainable Future, Bellevue
- 89th – Colville High School, Colville
The top 25 challenge finishers receive an invitation to participate in NASA’s student launch program to continue testing high-powered rockets and challenging mission boundaries.
