
, but his interests diverted him to rocketry. He set up a makeshift
chemistry lab to create rocket fuel. Kyle Clayton photo.
When Haines High School junior Joseph Rossman, 17, was about 8-years old he asked his father a question: “If I fall through a hole in the earth, will I stop in the middle because of gravity on the other side, or will I go all the way through?”
His father, Scott Rossman, had a question of his own. “I thought, where did you come up with that one?” Scott Rossman said. “What little kid sits down and thinks up that?”
There are myriad questions one could ask about Rossman. For example, what kind of 9-year-old child drags out an old motor buried in a shed’s forgotten junk pile and tinkers it back to life? “I certainly didn’t think he’d get it going, but all of a sudden it was bouncing around the driveway,” Scott Rossman said. “It wasn’t attached to anything and it was running.”
Other questions one might ask: What 17-year-old decides to build a Tesla coil in the middle of his bedroom during Christmas break? Or what high schooler can quote Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin or memorize the first 50 elements in the periodic table? What teenager in Alaska is currently reading “Fundamentals of Astrodynamics” and applying its theories and equations by making rocket fuel?
Rossman has a unique drive, passion and obsession for hands-on, self-directed learning. “I have always loved the idea that I could teach myself anything,” Joseph Rossman said while sitting at his desk that is covered in electronic parts, theoretical manuals and a homemade rocket engine. “You don’t have to wait for anyone. It’s all about you. It never ceases to baffle me how much I can learn if I just sit here and build something. I do not like to just learn theory. You can learn theory all you want-anywhere, in college or in school. Until you actually do it, then you have no idea how it applies.”
Rossman was recently named Technology Student of the Year by the Alaska Society for Technology and Education (ASTE) for, in part, building an unmanned aerial vehicle capable of flying longer than average distances. He bought an airplane kit, and then modified it with an upgraded electronic speed controller, and a rotating camera mount that he designed and built using his 3D printer.
Haines school technology coordinator Sam McPhetres and science teacher Mark Fontenot nominated Rossman for the award. McPhetres is an ASTE board member. “We look for candidates who show skill, eagerness to learn more,” McPhetres said. “When Joseph came in with his different videos and his Instagram page and said ‘Check out this rocket fuel I made in the kitchen,’ I talked to Mr. Fontenot and asked, ‘First of all, is this legal?'”
A panel of judges unanimously chose Rossman as the best high school technology student in the state, McPhetres said.
Rossman has always been fascinated by aviation. At 12 years old, he built planes using foam board. As his airplane building became more advanced, his interest moved to electronics. “Nicola Tesla is my role model,” Rossman said. “One of his greatest machines was the Tesla coil so I decided to build one because it’s a very complicated contraption that holds a lot of value if you build one, because you learn so much. The concepts are very abstract and hard to get a hold of until you actually build it.”
Rossman learned at an early age that the process is often more valuable for the individual than the end state of any given project. His understanding of resonance, frequencies, voltage, transformer theory, capacitance and resonant circuits became deeper through the process of building his Tesla coil, which remains unfinished.
It’s only half-built because his curiosity careened toward another subject. Working on the Tesla coil sparked his interest in capacitors, a type of battery that emits all its energy at once, which propelled him back to the skies, and space. “I also got really deep into rocketry,” Rossman said pointing to a metal pipe on his windowsill. “I was just tapping these holes for screws and the tap broke off inside there. That really ruined my day because I’m going to have to cut this whole section off and I’m going to have a shorter tube for rocket fuel. And I make my own rocket fuel.”
Rossman concocted rocket fuel in his recently built chemistry lab using sugar and potassium nitrate that he bought from a local hardware store.
Rossman’s plethora of interest has him bouncing from book to circuit board to beaker more often than he’d like. “Oh yeah and I hate myself for it,” Rossman joked. “I’d rather go full force on something but, you know, school gets in the way a lot.”
Despite school getting in the way, Rossman is a devoted student. He’s the junior class president, vice president of the National Honor Society and plays percussion in the pep band. Weekends are spent in his shop and weekdays are spent at school, studying and doing homework. For all his intelligence and drive for learning that sets him apart, he shares something in common with the standard high schooler.
“I go to bed around 9:30 then fall asleep at 10:30 because I’m on my phone just like every other teenager, regrettably,” Rossman said.
Still, his screen time is spent less on scrolling through social media than it is devouring knowledge from websites such as NASA.gov. “We live in a day and age where we can pull our phones out of our pockets and in half a second, we can know something that we didn’t earlier,” Rossman said. “All of our knowledge is online and you can access it for free. It’s amazing.”
Rossman’s interests delve into literature, philosophy and morality as well. Haines High School English teacher Alex Van Wyhe said Rossman regularly stays after school where they discuss themes in the works of literature they read. After reading “Beowulf,” the pair discussed apathy, nihilism and ideas of absolute good versus absolute evil, and the gray area in between.
“He has this really deep sense of moral character as well, and intentionally so,” Van Wyhe said. “He’s trying to develop his moral character. He reads about it. He talks about it. He has crises over it and then tries to step forward at a level that’s pretty unmatched among his peers.”
Independent to the point of stubbornness, Rossman wasn’t always the kindest child or student.
“From kindergarten through at least fifth grade he was in the office all the time and never doing what he was told, in trouble all the time, all of that,” his father said. “He wasn’t a bad kid, he just was never doing what he was supposed to be doing and always thinking he should be doing something else.”
Rossman described himself as “a little brat” who goofed off and didn’t pay attention, and as “a trouble maker all around.”
He said he changed sometime during his freshman year. He can’t point to why, but said he realized that if he was going to have time allotted to him, he should use it well.
“I just felt like I needed to start crafting something for myself, just like I do with all my other projects. A lot of people, I don’t think they reflect on themselves a whole lot and how they can actively make themselves better,” Rossman said. “Accepting your mistakes, that’s a thing you learn the rest of your life.”
Whether it’s a lapse in behavior or engineering, moving on from failure is also a lesson Rossman has learned early. “After many fried circuits, hours and hours of printing, printers that burn up, propeller chop and crashes, lots and lots of crashes, this is what you can achieve,” Rossman said in a YouTube video showing how he engineered his unmanned, radio-operated plane.
A camera mounted on Rossman’s plane captured the video. The footage shows his creation taking off from the field next to the school, and ascending to an altitude higher than the surrounding mountains as it soars into the blue skies above Haines.