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EL students launch cat space suit with weather balloon

EAST LIVERPOOL --East Liverpool graduates Preston Dawson, Nevaeh Chavis, Riley Cox and Lee Michewicz wrapped up their senior years

soaring to new heights.

The team of STEM students coached by STEM teacher Gerald Bartlett was one of 30 winning teams in the NASA TechRise Student Challenge from around the country who watched via live stream on July 21 as their technology experiments were launched into the stratosphere on a high-altitude weather balloon. The balloon from Aero Star, based in Sioux Falls, conducted the launch from Hurley, South Dakota.

According to an article from by Chloe Tuck of NASA's Armstong Flight Research Center, the student's projects reached an altitude of 70,000 feet (13 miles above the Earth) during the approximate six-hour flight.

The payloads all science and technology experiments by the teams of students involved collected data on a range of space exploration and Earth observation experiments in areas such as radiation sensing and shielding, agriculture, human health, weather and climate, according to Tuck.

The four East Liverpool students had been working with Bartlett since January on their project called "Kitties in Space" in which they experimented to create a space suit for a cat and test the effects a cat in space may experience.

The cat space suit created by the students had sensors measuring radiation, pressure, temperature and humidity. The students sewed a cat suit and used a 3D printer to print a three-dimensional cat head and embedded sensors into the whole project.

According to Dawson the catsuit was made out of material that NASA uses on their launch suits. The three main materials used were nylon, to mitigate radiation; mylar, for flexibility; and Kevlar, to keep in heat. The sensors attached to the suit would track how well the materials worked.

According to a press release from East Liverpool City Schools, Bartlett said that the students chose cats in space for their project because it was found during the COVID-19 pandemic that contact with small animals such as cats was good for mental health.

According to Bartlett, the students worked with the non-profit organization TechRise. They consulted with mechanical, electrical and computer science engineers who throughout the program, giving them advice on how to build the cat suit while making sure they met quality standards and coding. The students did a presentation to NASA engineers who spoke with them on their procedures.

"The project was phenomenal to see, and it was a great experience for the kids," Bartlett said. "They got a lot out of it. They got to get some hands-on experience with coding and software and how to meet very exacting criteria like being expected to keep their package under a certain way and designed everything themselves."

Bartlett was thrilled to see how successful the project was for the students and thought they did a fantastic job.

Bartlett noted that this experience would benefit all four of the students as they venture off to college and then on to pursue their chosen careers because the project was a great real-life example of the engineering design process.

"These students had to take an idea from the absolute basics of we want to do this thing of maybe putting a cat in space to what does it look like in a practical sense that is ethical and possible to do given the constraint they had and produce an end project," Bartlett said.

Dawson said he thought it was really cool to finally see all the hard work they students had invested in for months finally pay off as he watched the project launch.

"It was something I had never done before and to have something launched up that we had worked on by Future Engineers company and NASA, it was really something special, Dawson said. "It was definitely a sense of pride, something to be really proud of."

Dawson, now a student at Ohio State University in the Honors College Medical Program pursuing a major in bioengineering, feels this project will benefit him within his first couple of semesters in college as he will be required to participate in a group project that will be based around robotics, coding, wiring, and the use of the sensors.

"I gained so much experience with that from this project, this semester, that it will carry right over," Dawson said.

Cox said she thought it was really cool to see all of their hard work finally go up and that she enjoyed the whole experience, especially learning new things and developing new ideas.

Cox is attending Marietta University where she is pursuing a degree in psychology and believes the experience will help her with group projects and working with other people.

Chavis and Michewicz were not able to be reached for comment.

The students are waiting for the data to be collected and be sent back to them on how the suit the performed.

kgarabrandt@mojonews.com