IGNITE Club at Mountainview

Field trip to Stoke Space facility in Moses Lake ignites interest in aerospace

Recently, 12 fifth-grade girls from Mountainview’s IGNITE Club visited the Stoke Space rocket testing facility in Moses Lake. Mrs. De Wet, Mountainview’s school counselor, leads the club which stands for “Inspiring Girls Now in Technology Evolution.”

Mrs. De Wet organizes activities throughout the year to provide young women in the IGNITE Club the opportunity to explore STEM-related careers. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.

In the past, students in the IGNITE Club have participated in “virtual” field trips via Zoom. The recent trip to Moses Lake was the first in-person trip for our students in the Mountainview IGNITE Club.

The girls and their drivers – Mrs. De Wet and principal, Mr. Wyckoff – departed from school at 6:20 am and reported to the test launch facility in rural Moses Lake at 8:45 am. They had a full morning of activities, including meeting the Stoke Space team members, touring the different launch test pads and the engine testing bays, and ending with a panel discussion with three very influential women in the company.

The first woman is an aerospace engineer based in Seattle, the second panelist is the Vice President of the launch facility in Moses Lake, and the third woman is an engineer who works on developing and improving the launch pads.

No cell phones or photos were allowed inside the facility. The group photo for the field trip was taken during “parking lot snack time.”

Founded only five years ago, Stoke Space is a relatively young aerospace company. The company’s vision is to build a reusable 2-stage rocket that can fly satellites into low Earth orbit every 24 hours.

Stoke Space is in competition with Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk. Stoke Space designs and builds their rockets in Kent, Washington and they test the rockets at their facility in Moses Lake.

For a future test, Stoke Space has been allotted the use of Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where John Glenn was launched in 1962 to become the first American to reach orbit. John Glenn was launched into orbit in the Mercury Friendship-7 capsule which can be seen in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The goal for Stoke Space is to complete a full-scale rocket launch in Florida within the next two years.

This field trip showed these young girls from Mountainview Elementary that anything is possible. When asked how she chose to build rockets as a career, one of the Stoke Space engineers said, “I’ve just always chased what I enjoyed. I worked on submarines before I became interested in rockets. When this opportunity came up, I chased that dream and I can’t imagine being anywhere else.”

After the field trip, Mrs. De Wet commented, “I think each of our students learned today that anything is possible if you set your mind to it.”