US high school student loses two science projects to rocket explosions

Julia Powell hasn't finished high school, but the 15-year-old is suddenly one of the world's leading experts in the difficulty of space flight. Powell has twice helped build science experiments to be sent to the International Space Station, and twice watched her projects get vaporised due to rocket failures.

"I always knew it was hard to launch a rocket," says Powell, a second-year student at Duchesne Academy in Houston. "But I had never thought it was that hard that it would happen to me twice."

On a recent Sunday morning, Powell was driving to nearby Galveston with a friend when she got a call from her dad, who had promised to record the SpaceX launch.

"He told me it had exploded and I thought he was joking," Powell recalls. "So he put me on speaker phone and had me listen to the news. And then I was like, OK, he's not joking, it actually failed again."

Powell has spent almost two years hoping to conduct research in space, and says she won't give up now. After the explosion, she called Kathy Duquesnay, the teacher overseeing the project, to talk about the next step.

"I don't like quitting things," Powell says. "We spent a lot of time on it and it's kind of like, why stop now?"

It all started in Powell's 8th grade year. The Centre for the Advancement of Science in Space granted her science class - taught by Duquesnay - a chance design an experiment for the International Space Station.