Last week was a rather exciting time. Not only did we set up for testing, we moved our lab — twice. And all within four days.

Stevens is modernizing and expanding, so there are plenty of active construction sites around campus. You may remember that Castle Point Rocketry’s lab space in Griffith is right next to one. That’s why we had to move two months back. Early last week, we were notified of that construction zone needing to overtake our lab space for some finishing touches. We had to be out by Friday. So, we were offered another space in the basement of the Burchard Building.

We went to look at the space. 200 extra square feet made the move enticing, but there was a lot of work that needed to be done. The school’s machine shop occupied this space for many years, so there were rust marks, flaky paint, and a fine layer of metal dust on every surface.

The team spent three nights up until 2:00am refinishing the room. We washed the walls. The floors were swept, vacuumed, rinsed, scrubbed, revacuumed, and squeegeed. We brought tables up and wrapped compressed air hoses up into the ceiling. Finally, it looked appropriate for our use.

The final play before moving all of our tools and rocket parts up was to set up the clean room. After all, bringing clean parts up from Griffith just to lay them on the floor of an old machine shop isn’t the best plan. Thursday night found Nathan and Dakota laying thick plastic siding and flooring, with Will and Tom adding a vestibule. We called it a night and headed out.

Friday morning, we visited another construction site — the one just outside Burchard. We wanted to use the rental truck to move our lab up all in one go, but needed permission first. In a whirlwind couple of hours, we found out that room was already promised to someone else… So our clean room was torn down, the tables were removed, and we skedaddled back down to Griffith.

And here we’ll stay for at least two more weeks. Sure, the excitement of new lab space was fleeting, but we won’t complain. No one can, with this view!