Pinckney students reach for the stars with U of M partnership

Pinckney, we have liftoff.

Recently, Pinckney New Tech High School physics students teamed up with members of the University of Michigan Rocket Engineering Association to launch several rockets close to 900 feet into the sky above the Pinckney football field.

Friday's launch day was the culmination of about two weeks of work involving Joel Craig's physics students and University of Michigan engineering students.

The high school students were grouped together in teams of five, each group coming up with a unique rocket design, and then using materials and expert guidance provided by their college counterparts to construct them.

"It was a pretty cool experience to build rockets like this," said Cristian Little, a high school junior who said he likes rocket science but had never "built anything like this before."

"It was great to have the opportunity," Little said. "It was nice of the (U-M) students to come out here early in the morning to make this possible. They had to get up at 4 a.m. a few mornings; you have to give them props for doing that."