Scott Williams, a rising junior at Gloucester High School, was among 120 students to attend a residential academy Aug. 20-26 at NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility.

Williams was one of the 300 students accepted to 2016 Virginia Space Coast Scholar Program, a partnership between the Virginia Space Grant Consortium, the Wallops Flight Facility and the state. 

Through his sophomore year, Williams joined the other 300 selected students in taking an online, five-module interactive course on NASA programs. During the course, students designed and tested an aircraft wing, did research projects, wrote technical reports and became familiar with many of NASA’s missions.

Based on his performance in the course, Williams was among the 120 students selected to attend the seven-day residential program at Wallops Island. 

In the August academy, Williams was part of a design team studying sounding rockets and developing a mission to use them to study a deep space nebula. The...