Julia Powell, 15, hasn't finished high school, but she is suddenly one of the world's top experts in the difficulty of space flight. Powell has twice helped build science experiments to be sent to the International Space Station, and twice she has watched her projects get vaporized because of rocket failures.
"I always knew it was hard to launch a rocket," said Powell, a rising sophomore at Duchesne Academy in Houston. "But I had never thought it was that hard that it would happen to me twice."
On the morning of June 28, Powell was driving to nearby Galveston with a friend when she got a call from her dad, who had promised to video-record the SpaceX launch.
"He told me it had exploded, and I thought he was joking," Powell recalled.
Powell has spent almost two years hoping to conduct research in space. Shortly after the explosion, she called Kathy Duquesnay, the teacher overseeing the project, to talk about her next step.
"I don't like quitting things," Powell said. "We spent a lot of time on it, and it's kind of like, why stop now?"
It all started in the fall of Powell's eighth-grade year. The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space granted her science class -- taught by Duquesnay -- a chance to design an experiment for the International Space Station.
The students brainstormed about potential experiments and narrowed them down to what NASA would approve. Then the students voted and selected a project to test the effect of blue and red LED light on plant growth in space.
Powell was assigned to the plant-growth media team to determine what their pea shoots could grow in. They considered water and soil before settling on a gel-like substance.
The project was scheduled to launch the next fall, October 2014, on an Orbital Sciences rocket in Wallops Island, Va.
But the rocket blew up shortly after liftoff. Powell learned her first lesson in how tough spaceflight is.
Powell and the rest of her former classmates got an email from their former teacher asking if they wanted to help rebuild the experiment.
The final experiment, rebuilt nearly identically to the first project, took up about as much space as the size of two editions of War and Peace stacked atop each other.
Powell's project was one of 51 student experiments that NanoRacks, a launch services provider, shepherded onto SpaceX's rocket for the June 28 launch. The SpaceX rocket was the third cargo mission to the space station to end in failure since October, and the second in a row.
Powell's project wasn't the only one destroyed. An algae experiment by elementary school students at her school and two projects from nearby Awty International were also on board.
"It's a little disappointing, but there were so many other projects that were on that rocket," Powell said. "Ours was just a school project and compared to some of the others -- years of researching and funding that went into some of the other projects -- I really feel for the other researchers."
SundayMonday on 07/12/2015