| SAS
Sponsors Rocketry Team
Mark Streitman, President, New Jersey
Chapter of the SAS
I launched my first model rocket when
I was in sixth grade. I had never even heard of
model rocketry until I learned about the rocketry club
at school. Being an avid fan of the space program, I
was immediately hooked. I can clearly remember
my first rocketing experience. I'll bet that most members
of the Society for Amateur Scientists have a special
fondness for model rockets, too. (I launched my
first model rocket when a seventh grader in Colorado
Springs in 1959. Editor.)
So it was a surprise when last fall
a person e-mailed me to ask if I would sponsor a team
for the NAR contest. What was NAR, I wondered? My first
thought was that the e-mail was spam. However, spammers
don't mention the town where I live. So I read
the e-mail more carefully and thought this sounded interesting.
So I passed the e-mail onto the rest of our group to
ask their opinions. Everyone thought it sounded like
a good idea. So I wrote back and eventually called
their house.
It turned out that the person was a
former member of our group, and he and his son had attended
a number of our earlier meetings. At that point I told
them that Shawn Carlson, Executive Director of the Society
for Amateur Scientists, needed to approve this project,
for we as a chapter have no legal standing on our own.
Shawn thought that this was a good idea, too. After
some legal back and forth, Shawn gave his blessing.
So now for the question that has to
be on your mind: What is the NAR and this contest? The
NAR is the National Association
of Rocketry and has been in existence since
1957. They promote, train and organize rocketry groups. They
work with low-power model rocketry (Estes types) and
high-power rocketry. This contest is called the Team
America Rocketry Challenge .
The idea is that teens in grades 7
through 12 form a team that competes with other teams
from around the US. An organization must sponsor
the team (that's where we came in). Most of the
sponsors are schools, but some schools don't want to
get involved, as was the case here. The idea of the
contest is to launch a rocket and
have it come down in exactly 60 seconds or as close
to that as possible. Oh, and by the way, the rocket
has to carry one or two raw eggs and return them unbroken.
The rockets are scored mostly by how close they come
to 60 seconds.
There are a number of other
rules.
This contest requires the teams to
learn about rocketry and do a lot of experimentation
with different designs, keeping track of the variables
involved and slowly optimizing as best as they can under
real world conditions to get a rocket that can perform
to the above goals. The rockets can free fall,
have parachutes or streamers. They just have to
get the rockets back down in 60 seconds without breaking
the eggs.
Since the teams have to do the work
themselves, I just gave them some basic advice. My
advice basically came down to the K.I.S. (Keep It Simple)
principle. Being teens with no real life experience,
they had grand visions of advanced NASA-type rockets
that used advanced materials that they had read about
on the web or in magazines. I found out from them that
the NAR has some advice for getting your first rocket
to qualify. It offers advice on what kit rockets are
good basic designs to work with, how to modify them,
and so forth. So I advised them to just start there
and slowly improve the design until they got it working.
This would be hard enough. After they had that under
their belt, then they could work on their next model.
So how did they do? The short answer is that they qualified,
meaning they got a rocket up and down without breaking
the eggs. The top 100 teams got to go to the finals
held in May near Washington, D.C. They didn't
qualify for that, but there's always next year.
On behalf of the SAS, I'd like to
congratulate these young people for their work, I know
we'll see great things from them in the future.
My thanks to David Eveleth for the
pictures of the team and their rocket. 
|
