In a cinderblock corner of Yough High School, members of the Cougar Rocketry Team gathered on a recent Wednesday not to calculate gunpowder proportions or discuss payload composition, but to plow through paperwork.

"I hate paperwork," groaned sophomore Stephanie Abbott.

Such is life, when you're a teenage girl -- and a contractor for NASA.

For the second year in a row, the Yough rocketry team will travel from Herminie to Huntsville, Ala., to participate in NASA's Student Launch Initiative. Only 18 schools this year and 10 schools last year from across the country were invited to compete in the SLI, to be held April 23-27.

This year, as last year, three out of the four Yough team members are girls, making them minor celebrities among the SLI demographic that junior Ashley Wiley describes as "99 percent male."

Just to qualify for the SLI, teams must first place in the top 25 among about 700 entrants to the Team America Rocketry Challenge, an annual contest where teams aim to send a rocket carrying two eggs into the air for exactly 45 seconds to a height of 750 feet and have it land with the eggs still intact.

Those top 25 teams then had to craft a proposal for a scientific experiment that would be carried as payload by a rocket that they would design to fly a mile high.

"It's not like they just put something together and took it to the Carnegie Science Center," said Don Gilbert, physics and gifted instructor and rocketry team mentor. "We are considered a subcontractor for NASA."

Yough's rocket for this year, named Dorothy II, measures 10 feet tall and weighs about 30 pounds. The rocket is so powerful that a low explosive users permit is required to buy the fuel. Doing a test launch would require notifying the Federal Aviation Administration and all airports within 100 miles.

Team president Amy Rene Bickerstaff concedes that she initially thought of the rocket team as "geeky," and had to be convinced to join by her friend Alicia Bowser, who is an "assistant to the team" this year because she's choosing the Yough senior prom over another trip to Huntsville.

What Amy thought would be social suicide actually ended up as social salvation. "It helped me a lot to get out of my shell," she said, noting that the girls on the team are now some of her best friends.

The team consists of Amy, Ashley, Stephanie and sophomore Josh Sarosinski.

Walking to school for a rocketry meeting in the summer before her junior year, Amy came up with the idea for the team's SLI experiment. Looking up at the trees around her, she thought about maple seed pod "whirlybirds" that she would throw in the air as a kid and watch spin to the ground.

Perhaps the rocket could release whirlybirds, she thought, and the experiment could track how far they disperse. "It was something so simple that we could make more complicated," she said.

The official, complicated version of the experiment now aims "to determine the conical spread pattern result based on the ground level wind direction and speed to assess if ground level wind conditions can be used to accurately predict the fallout region for biological spores and whether ground wind speed can be used for weather analysis."

Amy also came up with the name Dorothy for the rocket, playing off both the name of the weather-measuring device in the movie "Twister" and the character from the "Wizard of Oz," a movie that Amy says she has every line of memorized.

When the team took Dorothy down to Huntsville last year, they got to present their project to an audience that included rocket scientists and astronauts (Buzz Aldrin was "so nice," gushed the girls, and astronaut Dominic Antonelli asked them all sorts of technical questions). A Boeing executive presented them with a plaque, and they later traveled to Harrisburg to be formally recognized by the state Legislature.

Dorothy, however, didn't fare quite so well. After a flawless launch, Dorothy's payload shifted, resulting in the failure of the "ejection charge" that would have deployed the parachute.

On the descent, Dorothy spun back to the ground, her fiberglass body cracking as she landed on a road.

Convinced that the experiment had potential, the team re-applied and was one of eight teams from last year's SLI invited back this year.

The team has completely changed the design for Dorothy II and added an electronic weather-gathering device (code name: Toto) that will be released by the rocket.

One of the trickiest parts this year, said Ashley, is figuring out the proper amount of gunpowder to use so that the rocket will blow apart and properly release its payload, but not so much that the rocket becomes, as Mr. Gilbert puts it, "shrapnel."

And when the team members aren't doing rocket design, or hundreds of pages of paperwork, they're raising money. Though the school received $2,000 from Westinghouse and $1,250 from NASA, the students had to raise an additional $7,000 to pay for the trip to Alabama.

They've traveled to the Sam's Club in Greensburg, trying, with limited success, to raise money from customers. On Saturday, they'll host a "Rocket Fair" at the school from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., holding an auction for merchandise donated by the Steelers and Penguins.

To spread the word about the team and fund raising, Amy proudly wears her "Cougar Rocketry" T-shirt during her 25-hour-per-week job as a cashier at the Bill's Dandy Dollar grocery store.

The endless fund raising is growing tiresome, said Ashley, in part because it's taking away from the time that could be used for rocketry.

"I don't think other teams had as much difficulty as we did because we're from such a poor area," she said.

Still, working with rockets has been a life-changing experience. Alicia and Ashley both hope to join the military, with Alicia enlisting in the Navy to focus on meteorology. Ashley is planning to apply to the Air Force Academy, though she may want to stay closer to home and go to Penn State, she said.

For Amy, rockets are just a hobby, and working with wolves is her career dream. For financial reasons, she's planning to go to Westmoreland County Community College next year, hoping to transfer to Penn State University or Thiel College for a four-year zoology degree.

She credits Mr. Gilbert with opening her eyes to the possibilities beyond Herminie, where horses graze in a yard just off the town's main street.

"This is an old coal town. If you're from here, you're stuck around here," said Amy. "He's giving us a way out."

This is Mr. Gilbert's fourth year coaching the rocket team and he estimates that he spends about 300 unpaid hours per year working with them. With the competition coming up soon, he's now regularly hosting weekend rocket club meetings at his house in Greensburg.

To put her own experience in perspective, Ashley likes to watch the movie "October Sky," a true story about a group of "rocket boys" in a 1950s West Virginia coal town who competed in rocket competitions rather than work in the mines.

"Gilbert is our Mrs. Riley," she said, referencing the teacher in the movie who believes in the boys and encourages them to go to college. "And we're the rocket boys."