Smudge before flight

“I’m moving to Boston in three weeks!” At graduation, I learned that I had been accepted into the Interphase EDGE program, an incredible opportunity to acclimate to life at MIT before the 2022 school year begins.

I was glad to get the opportunity, as I was facing a major life change back home in Claremore, on the Cherokee Nation reservation in northeastern Oklahoma. I’ve only been away by myself once, on a fifth-grade field trip to space camp in Huntsville, Alabama, where I first fell in love with aerospace engineering.

It didn’t take long to find a community on campus. To my surprise, of the dozen or so students at the Indigenous community welcome event, three students and one undergraduate were in the aero-astro department. As a prospective Course 16 and FIRST Robotics student, I was excited to discover that they were planning to form a new First Nations Launch (FNL) rocket competition team, the NASA Artemis Student Challenge. It was the perfect opportunity to combine my technical passion with my cultural roots.

That first year, many doubted the need for our team. “MIT already has a Rocket Team,” they would say. But while most construction teams are defined by the specific projects they work on, the product is only one aspect of the experience.

Yes, I learned how to design, build, launch and safely return a model rocket. But doing it alongside other indigenous engineers in a team we call MIT Doya (ᏙᏯ, Cherokee for beaver) taught me more than engineering skills. In addition to learning how to work with composites or design fins, I learned how to manage classes and connect with professors. I learned about graduate school. And I learned how to celebrate my indigenous identity and honor my ancestors through my work. For example, we often hold smudging ceremonies—burning sage to purify ourselves or our rockets—at our team meetings and competitions.

Our team emphasizes universal consensus and buy-in on the technical side and pays attention to the success of each team member on a personal level. We call this gadugi (ᎦᏚᎩ) in Cherokee, or “everyone helps each other.”

I also learned that embracing my culture can offer a better approach to engineering challenges. While many engineering settings encourage top-down decision making, our team tests and incorporates as many ideas as possible to include everyone, emphasizing universal consensus and buy-in on the technical side, while paying attention to each team member’s personal success level. We call this гагуги (ᎦᏚᎩ) in Cherokee, or “everyone helps each other.” And we think it’s led to better technical results—and a better experience for everyone on the team.

I feel incredibly fortunate to be working closely with other Indigenous students on an engineering project that we all care deeply about. I looked up to the older members of the team, seeing them as proof of what a native student at MIT can be and achieve. And I loved mentoring new members, passing on what I learned to help them excel.

Our launch weekends further expand our community, allowing us to work alongside inspiring Indigenous engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Blue Origin. I met my heroes and saw that it was possible to succeed as an Indian in aerospace engineering. In fact, my FNL experiences have already helped me secure an amazing internship. Last summer—exactly a decade after committing to aerospace engineering at Space Camp—I returned to Huntsville as a lunar payload intern on the Mark I Lunar Lander at Blue Origin.

Through the FNL team, I significantly improved my technical skills. As our systems and simulations run our first year, I have integrated all physical design components into a cohesive computer model with precision in geometry and mass distribution. With that model, I can perform simulated flights while adjusting to different launch conditions and trying out different engines. A small change in the ground can lead to a big change in our final elevation, which must be within a certain range—so this analysis drives the overall design.

In our first year, our challenge was to recreate the kit rocket design while making it easier to build all the parts ourselves, primarily using hand-laid carbon fiber and fiberglass. We finished in second place and were named Rookie Team of the Year.

For 2023-2024, our challenge was to build a rocket large enough to carry a deployable UAV, which led us to build a 7.5-inch diameter airframe. We also had to design and build the drone’s chassis to meet strict specifications: it had to fit inside the rocket on the launch pad, deploy to apogee (ours was 2,136 feet), unfold from a compact folded configuration to 16 x 16 inches, descend for chute to 500 feet, then release the chute for piloted navigation to the landing pad. In order to meet FAA requirements, two members of our team studied and obtained part 107 remote pilot certifications to fly the drone.

Since this new challenge required us to build a rocket while simultaneously designing and building a drone, we split into two sub-teams to work on both in parallel. This approach required precise coordination between sub-teams to ensure everything would integrate well for the final launch. As team captain, I managed this coordination while remaining involved in the technical side as systems and simulation manager and airframe manager. And as we worked our way through the project’s milestones from proposal to flight readiness review, we kept in mind that we needed both an operational drone and a safe flight at the right altitude to meet the challenge.

In April, our team traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin to test our rocket. We loaded the chutes and cargo, blessing it with some medicine before sending our hard work into the sky. But when I went to fill up our engine, the engine mount fell out of my hand. We quickly proceeded to the range safety officer, who was able to save our rocket and our launch by adding an external engine restraint at the last minute. After that minor (but near-catastrophic) delay, we had a safe launch and successful recovery—and earned the Next Step Award, a $15,000 grant to represent FNL in the University Launch Initiative, a NASA-run competition open to all, for Season 2024–’25.

Six weeks later, when the overall winners of the competition were announced, we were thrilled to learn that we had won the grand prize! With bragging rights, we won a VIP trip to the Kennedy Space Center in August and got to walk through the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building, explore the shuttle landing pad, see Polaris Dawn on the launch pad and watch Starlink’s launch from the beach in the early hours of the morning.

This year, I am honored to once again serve as Team Captain, leading an expanded team as we tackle the challenges of the new Student Startup Initiative. I am already looking forward to May, when we will launch the rocket that we will be perfecting until then. And to honor our indigenous heritage and send her off to heaven with good intentions, I’ll make sure we pamper ourselves before the flight.

Hailey Polson ’26, an aero-astro major and citizen of the Cherokee Nation, is captain of MIT’s First Nations Launch Team.

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