The launch of Akron’s Rocket Man: From UA, to NASA and beyond

Smith, 18, a senior at Crestwood High School in Mantua, Ohio, ready for a life of rock stardom.

Kenneth Smith has always reached for the stars.

“I wanted to be a rock star,” said the Streetsboro, Ohio, native. “I had hair down to my chest. I was listening to Led Zeppelin and playing in bands. I thought I was cool.”

Too cool for school, in fact.

“When I was in high school, I didn’t care,” he said. “My teachers were always like, ‘You have potential, you should try harder.’ I was like, ‘OK, but I want to be a rock star.’ The only reason I went to college was because it was the thing to do, and I picked biochemistry because I figured it sounded cool, and I would just do that until my music career took off.”

But that career never launched. Instead, in Smith’s first year of college, his father suddenly lost his job, and Smith dropped out of school to work at a label-making factory to support his family. For the next two years, he toiled 60-70 hours per week.

He felt trapped, earthbound. On summer nights, after finishing a double shift, he walked into the cool air and knew that somewhere, beyond the swelter of the shop floor, another world was waiting for him.

From limelight to starlight

Urged by a concerned friend, Smith, who had been interested in science, began volunteering at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

“I dressed up in this rainbow-colored lab coat,” he said, “and talked about science and performed demonstrations for these little kids and their parents. One of my favorites was where you use liquid nitrogen to slow the air molecules in a balloon so slow that the balloon appears to be deflated as soon as you take it out of the nitrogen. Then, as the air slowly gets back to room temperature, the molecules become more energetic, and the balloon begins to expand. It appears to be magic, but it’s science.”

The children’s curiosity and wonder stirred something inside of him, dilating his heart like that balloon.

“It was weird … those kids, they made me happy again,” he said. “They were so excited, like ‘What! Wow, how did you do that!’ They inspired me.”

He felt something of that childlike wonder every time he passed by the NASA Glenn Research Center’s Visitor Center (housed in the Great Lakes Science Center), where he saw the display of the Apollo Command Module, a capsule that traveled 26.5 million miles in space on the Skylab 3 space mission in 1973.

That hunk of aluminum, which had bathed in the light of the stars, filled him with fascination and pride for the United States: “America, gotta love it,” he thought to himself, smiling.

He later read about the Apollo space program — and particularly the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz joint space mission between the U.S. and the Soviet Union — and began to take pride, not just in his country, but in humanity.

“Here you had two nations in the midst of a cold war, and they set aside their differences to come together for this shared purpose,” he said. “It gave me a new perspective on space exploration, not just as a technological endeavor, but as a source of human connectedness.”

Kenneth and the Akronauts

While at UA, Smith, along with his classmate Jesse Batko, was not content to simply read about rockets in the classroom.

“We were like, ‘Let’s launch our own stuff,’ Smith said. ‘What about a rocket team?’ We had no idea what we were doing, but we ended up learning a lot from some amateur rocketry people in Akron, and started building rockets and competing in competitions.”

The first group picture of UA’s Akronauts Rocket Design Team in 2014, featuring co-founders Smith (front, second from right) and Batko (front, far right).

Thus, UA’s Akronauts Rocket Design Team was born, with Dr. Francis Loth — Smith’s favorite professor — as its advisor. Since its founding by Smith and Batko in 2014, the team now boasts 60 members and placed in the top five in the NASA Student Launch Competition in 2019 and 2020.

In addition to co-founding the rocket team, Smith served as president of both the Engineering Student Council and the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society, before graduating from The Drs. Gary B. and Pamela S. Williams Honors College, with numerous awards, in the spring of 2015.

Vindicating those high school teachers who nagged him about his potential, he finished among the top 10 in his class, with a perfect 4.00 GPA.

Inspiring the next generation

Smith, under the moniker “Ksmooth the Engineering Dude,” provides STEM education outreach to children around the world. He is pictured here at Morehouse College in 2018, demonstrating how difficult it is to work in a pressurized suit.

Smith is currently a dynamics lead at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where he is working on the Gateway space station, intended to support long-term human exploration of the lunar surface.

He also travels around the world, providing STEM — or “STREAM,” as he calls it, including an “R” for research — education outreach to students under the persona of “Ksmooth the engineering dude.”

“I remember those kids in the science center who inspired me, and I want to inspire the next generation,” Smith said. “Sharing knowledge is the foundation of human progress. If knowledge is power, the most powerful thing you can do is give it away.”

Smith discussing the future of space exploration and the need for cooperation at the Global Aerospace Summit in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, in 2018.

Smith hopes, ultimately, to share that knowledge someday as a U.S. senator and science policy expert.

“Such experts serve as a bridge between researchers and the public,” he said. “They find ways to translate these esoteric, often highly technical scientific issues for ordinary people, in order to sell it as good policy. We need to do that, because even if we have the greatest scientists in the world, they can’t go anywhere without funding and public support.”