Jason Vest

(12/2023) The Grand Champion of the Mother Seton School 2023 Science Fair is at a loss. "Do you know where my pick-axe head is?"

Her tousle-haired-and-bearded grandfather Joe Annelli looks up. "I was just gonna say –"

Another voice interrupts. "It was over here, but I haven’t seen it in awhile," her father Chuck says. "Maybe in a garage somewhere on the street…?

"No no no," come another voice, feminine and considering in tone. "Not there…"

Science fair champion for a nifty astrophysics project, eighth grader Mackenzie Hager, bright of eyes and red hair, has no doubt as to her future: "I haven’t wanted to be anything but an astrophysicist since I was eight," she will tell you, matter-of-factly. (And leave you wondering - not unreasonably - if maybe she doesn’t mean that in present, as opposed to aspirational, register.) But she dabbles in other sciences as well.

So as the sun drops behind the mountains on a chilly November afternoon, the archaeology collection is being presented on the Hager family kitchen table in New Market. The array includes spent shells from Assateague. A Civil War bullet from nearabouts. An ancient rusty coffin nail. But the hyperlocal axe head – a find from a nearby creek amidst the 20 acres of woods she routinely explores – remains at large.

Mackenzie disappears in search of the elusive artifact. A visitor remarks to her family that it’s good to know at least some kids still, like, go outside and explore. Her father gestures to the acres of woods this last rambling house in the Lake Linganore development backs up on to, from its outer rim cul-de-sac perch. ("That’s her playground," he enthuses.) Awhile later she returns having given up on the axe head, having swapped it out for a LEGO recreation of… the Artemis mission to the moon.

Soon, what seems to be the entire LEGO history of NASA sits redeployed in the kitchen. (There’s more yet to build: "On her Christmas wish list this year," mom Katie Hager confides, "is the Apollo 11 lander set.") After a giving rundown on the specs, Mackenzie’s off once again to check on a biology/ag experiment she’s doing for the hell of it. She will next return to the kitchen table to chew over how to apply lessons learned from this year’s science project to next year’s.

At 12 going on 13, Mackenzie – an echo of Anya Taylor-Joy’s Beth Harmon character in The Queen’s Gambit, but with leavening dashes of Wednesday’s Wednesday Addams and Star Trek: Discovery’s Jett Reno – does, like, normal kid stuff: She’s a fourth generation Girl Scout, working on her Silver Award. She calls out the indignities and inanities of her age bracket and she lets her freak flag fly proudly within it. (Self-described school cohort/status: "Outcasts.") She has her likes and dislikes, as far as classes go. (She is as hard-wired for STEM as some of us are not.) She goes on adventures with her way-cool family, which includes a veterinarian grandfather, a public health nurse mom, and school bus driver father (who’s got some stories).

But she also has been seriously researching things like geothermic volcanic energy and its applications since she was a tot. Her focus shifted to space several years ago, when her eyes spied, and imagination was captured, by the sight of an orange streak ascending into the heavens – an International Space Station resupply launch from Wallops Island, whose bright exhaust profile can be seen from this far.

Unlike most kids whose dreams as regards space usually find voice as "I wanna be an astronaut," Mackenzie has no desire to go into space herself. Her love of astrophysics is also twinned with engineering - "I like actually building things - not just, like, going outside and walking around," she says. (The absence of outer space ambitions is just fine with her family, all of whom note, in varying ways, just how unforgiving and final space is."

But she frames those ambitions as simply "wanting to help out" – perhaps not surprising with a nurse mother who’s also in uniform (Commander, US Public Health Service), and an extended family for which mutual aid and assistance are robust. (Mackenzie’s grandfather Joe grew up in a Brooklyn brownstone of extended family and has never known anything but, and Chuck sums up his side of the family thusly: "My sister called one day and said, ‘Mom got brain cancer and she’s moving in with you Saturday,’ and I was like, ‘Going to clean out the room and get it ready right now.")

Thus a girl who has no designs to go into space herself is now focused on using the rest of her K-12 years in an attempt to find the right materials and construction for a space suit capable of ensuring humans can survive the unique radiation levels of Mars.

Last year’s experiment was a more general consideration of pesky-to-humans radiation on Mars; this year’s was a first stab at what combinations of materials might show the most promise and feasibility for use in new Mars-specific space suits. Next year’s project: An actual doll-size prototype suit that, along with the doll, she’ll bombard with different types of radiation (and measure with the Geiger counter she built herself to further consider its viability.

Though her family confides she is not the most reliable self-starter, once kick-started, she is a whirling dervish of activities and experiments, ping-ponging between at least a dozen different projects at any given time, and usually to good effect.

"Unless we happen to walk in and she’s flipping knives or whatever, we just let her do her thing," says her father Chuck, who describes himself as "crazy" for voluntarily choosing to drive a school bus. But as such, any challenges in parenting a precocious ADHD intellect are small beer, compared to playing ringmaster to a daily circus-on-wheels. And Mackenzie’s not the only high-maintenance scientist in the family. "My son did an experiment that left me scratching my head – I had to have something he needed for trying to quantify carbon dioxide, I had to have it mailed to the local fire house and only the local fire house," he says. "So is it any big deal that next year Mackenzie will irradiate a doll in a doll-space suit to see it fit works? Nope."

The Mother Seton School 2023 Science Fair Winners and Runners-Up:

6th Grade:

• 1st Maggie Slater - Do Equine Tendon Boots Do More Harm Than Good?
• 2nd Muna Jinadu - Naturally Preserving Grapes
• 3rd Sam Pollitt - Electromagnets

7th Grade:

• 1st Mia Bussey - Which surface has the most germs?
• 2nd Phillip Field - Rockets
• 3rd Madison Williams - Water Filtration
• 3rd Grace Williams - Greenhouse Gases

8th Grade

• 1st Grady Abruzzese - Interference of Radio Waves
• 2nd (tie) Noah Riling - Does Running Reduce Stress?
• 2nd (tie) Catalina Caretti - Which moisturizer retains the most liquid?
• 3rd Gabriel Valerio - PSI of soccer balls

Grand Champion Mackenzie Hagar - Radiation Protection Materials
 

Read other articles by Michael Rosenthal