Marvelous Mr. Simmons

Have you seen Mr. Simmons walking around campus? Have you ever wondered what he does outside of school? After school, Mr. Simmons runs two clubs at JMS, the Aerospace Club on Mondays and the Science Fair Club on Wednesdays. Furthermore, he collaborates with the Wolfpack Cubesat Development Team (WCDT) to design and build small satellites, known as Cubesats, and launch them into our atmosphere, and sometimes even into space. He has experience working with NASA officials, so he is definitely the right person to run these clubs!

Science Fair Club is a competitive club where students create an original experiment or design and compete with others to see who has the best experiment. The first goal would be to compete in the Palm Beach Regionals Science and Engineering Fair, which has around 700 kids from both middle and high school. “If you win there, you go to the State Science Fair in the Spring,” Mr. Simmons said. Then, the second goal is obviously to try to win! Good luck, Science Club!

The second club Mr. Simmons leads is the Aerospace Club. Mr Simmons states, “I am coming to Jupiter Middle, having done quite a bit of aerospace work with students in the last 10 years. I moved to Florida, well, first of all, I taught in Florida, and then I had an appointment in Washington, D.C., and I worked there for six years. And then I got an opportunity to prove that middle school students could design, build, test, and fly spacecraft.” In Aerospace, students engage in similar activities, such as learning to build high-altitude balloons. Sometimes, they even build miniature satellites (CubeSat) and launch them into space, or at least, the atmosphere. “We’re going to be building payloads that are going to go on a high altitude balloon in the spring, and a high altitude balloon should hit about 30 kilometers, which is about 100,000 feet altitude.” Mr. Simmons states. This gives middle school students a chance to show off their science and engineering skills, and even though they may be young, they are no less capable than anyone else. Reach for the stars, Aerospace Club!

Now for the star: Mr. Simmons! Not only is he an accomplished scientist, but he also owns a nonprofit company that sprouted from an after-school program. Mr Simmons states, “So I had an after-school club at a school that was [doing] aerospace and building satellites. And then when Covid hit, when everything just went online for a while, I just formed it as a 501C3 nonprofit tax-exempt…and the rest is history.” The company continues to thrive today, and what started as a small school club has become a big success.

Mr. Simmons also has experience working with bigger projects, such as a Zero-G flight. He went along on a flight so high that there was no gravity, and even more, he was accompanied by students. They were high school students being the first of their age to be on a Zero-G team in America!

As you can clearly see, Mr. Simmons is an intelligent, kind, and amazing person. He has had so much experience in so many different fields of science. We are so lucky to have him on our campus, and so lucky to be able to learn from a master scientist.