Student rocketry team soars in U.S. competition despite losing their motor in the mail

A slow-moving delivery nearly grounded the hopes of some high-flying rocketry students from Bellevue, Wash., over the weekend. But a last-minute scramble and motor purchase saved the day and capped a strong showing for Washington state teams at the 2026 National Finals of the American Rocketry Challenge.

Washington Youth Aerospace, a Redmond, Wash.-based team made up of six ninth graders from Bellevue’s Interlake High School, finished second in the annual competition in The Plains, Va., on Saturday. The finals featured 100 teams from a record pool of 1,107 teams that competed in the overall challenge.

Washington was represented by 11 teams, including eight from the Eastside of the Seattle area. Four of those teams finished in the top 10.

The competition features middle and high school students who are tasked with designing, building, and launching model rockets. The goal is to inspire students to pursue careers in aerospace and STEM.

Washington Youth Aerospace earned $15,000 for the second-place finish — an impressive showing after the team was in danger of not even being able to launch its rocket.

Because of the hazardous nature of rocket motors, they had to be shipped via ground transportation from coast to coast.

“We mailed it about two and a half weeks back,” said Sudheer Sirivara, a parent advisor and chaperone for the team. “We were tracking it and somewhere it got lost in between for a week.”

The motors arrived in New Jersey on Thursday and on Friday they were tracked to Philadelphia. Sirivara and the team were frantically searching the Washington, D.C., area to find a motor that provided the specs the team had planned around. A vendor on site proved to be a hero just before the event on Saturday.

“He spent about 25 minutes searching for it, and deep in his truck was one box that had this one motor that we needed,” Sirivara said, adding that the team’s actual motors were finally delivered by the Postal Service — two days after the event concluded.

The Washington Youth Aerospace team consists of students Mikhail Antipin, Anay Mediwala, Nikhil Sirivara, Daniel Tadesse, Bao-Ky Tran, and Antoine Vigneron.

Sirivara said their rocketry success started with good mentoring they received from teachers while they were at Bellevue’s Odle Middle School. An executive VP at Warner Bros. Discovery and a Microsoft veteran, he also credited the concentration of tech and engineering parents on the Eastside from companies including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others.

Good data collection doesn’t hurt either.

“You need to fire a lot of rockets to collect enough data to see how your rocket does in different wind conditions, weather conditions, temperatures,” Sirivara said.

In the finals, teams were scored on two launches. They needed to hit a target height of 730 feet for the first launch and 725 feet for the second. Rockets must stay airborne for between 36 and 39 seconds, and return to the ground safely with their unbroken cargo — an egg.

The Bishop’s School from La Jolla, Calif., took first place in the challenge and will represent the U.S. in the international finals — an event in which Bellevue’s Newport High School finished second just a few years ago.

Here are the final standings for Washington teams in the national finals:

• 2nd — Washington Youth Aerospace, Redmond
• 4th — Interlake High School (Team 1), Bellevue
• 6th — Newport High School (Team 2), Bellevue
• 7th — Odle Middle School, Bellevue
• 12th — Newport High School (Team 1), Bellevue
• 19th — Interlake High School (Team 2), Bellevue
• 33rd — Annie Wright Schools, Tacoma
• 38th — Tyee Middle School, Bellevue
• 69th — SmilingTree, Sammamish
• 89th — A Sustainable Future, Bellevue
• 89th — Colville High School, Colville

The challenge’s top 25 finishers receive an invitation to participate in NASA’s Student Launch initiative to continue their exploration of rocketry with high-powered rockets and challenging mission parameters.

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