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Are You Working with a 4-H Group?
The NAR established a national partnership with 4-H in 2007 and is in the process of publicizing the hobby and the NAR through 4-H and providing 4-H groups that want to start rocket clubs with NAR resource material on the hobby.
4-H has asked us to find out what 4-H clubs or chapters our members are already working with on rocketry activities. If you are working with a 4-H group, please let NAR Education Committee Chairman Vince Huegele know your name and the name and contact information for the 4-H group you are working with. Vince can be reached at: vinson.b.huegele@nasa.gov
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NAR Member Guidebook
One of the NAR's best membership benefits is a 64-page "NAR Member Guidebook" filled with rocket plans, how-to articles, copies of the Safety Codes, a list of NAR sections, and manufacturer discount coupons. Every new NAR member gets one within 6-8 weeks of joining, a month or so after the membership card. Renewing members get a copy of each new edition that comes out, which is every 2-3 years. This outstanding Guidebook is edited by NAR volunteer Mario Perdue. |
NAR National Events for 2009
NAR Convention (NARCON 2009) - to be held March 20-22, 2009 in Wethersfield, CT, just south of Hartford. Sponsored by CATO NAR Section, Event Director: Al Gloer. The event website is http://www.narcon2009.org
National Sport Launch (NSL 2009) - to be held Memorial Day weekend, May 23-25, 2009 at Richard Bong State Recreation Area, just west of Racine, WI. The event website is http://www.nsl2009.org.
Sponsored by WOOSH NAR Section, Event Director: Scott Goebel.
NAR Annual Meet (NARAM-51) - to be held August 8-14, 2009 near Johnstown, PA. Sponsored by Pittsburgh Space Command NAR Section, Contest Director Steve Foster. Events will be: 1/8A HD, A SD, 1/2A PD (mr), Random Alt, B R/G, B Altitude, D Dual Eggloft Dur, Peanut Scale, SciFi and Future Scale, R&D. Event website is http://www.naram.org
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Message from the NAR President
Greetings!
If you are one of the 1,211 NAR members who participated in the online survey that we just completed on November 1, thank you! This extraordinary response, and the thought that so many of you who participated put into your optional text comments, will provide all of us on the NAR Board of Trustees with the best and most direct information we have ever had on what in the NAR is working, and what needs to be improved or changed. It will take us a while to go through all the information this survey provided, and for us this will be time well-spent. These results will shape the agenda for our next Board meeting, at NARCON 2009 in March, and we will begin taking some actions in response even sooner than that.
I will post a summary of the survey numerical data on the NAR website and will let you know where it is via an announcement in the December Electronic Rocketeer. For those of you who volunteered to assist the NAR in some manner through your text comments in the survey, I will be in touch in the six weeks or so -- if you provided contact information. Thanks for volunteering to help the NAR, volunteers are how we deliver all of what we do.
Be safe, have fun, and pay forward.
Trip Barber, NAR 4322
NAR President
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Please help "launch" some 7th through 12th grade students' interest in rocketry as a hobby and in aerospace as a career by telling them about the Team America Rocketry Challenge competition that NAR co-sponsors. National prizes totaling $60,000 in cash are awarded to the top 10 teams and the 1st place team gets a free trip to the Paris Air Show. Registration information is available at the event website, and there is more information on TARC on the NAR website's Team America page. Registration for TARC 2009 closes on December 1.
NAR Senior Member volunteers are needed to serve as "mentors", or local rocketry advisors, to TARC teams that register from places near where they live. If you'd like to be part of this rewarding "pay forward" NAR program, contact president@nar.org. |
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NARTREK Skills Program
NARTREK is the "NAR Training of Rocketeers for Skills and Knowledge" program. It consists of a series of achievement levels that participants of all ages can earn, self-paced, without deadlines and on their own if necessary. Each level requires more skill to complete than the previous one. NARTREK is a program designed for the individual flier to challenge himself or herself by building their rocketry skills to meet a series of goals involving flying a wide range of types of rockets, and to earn recognition with patches and certificates. It is administered by NAR volunteer George Scheil, who works with participants online and by mail to help solve problems in meeting the goals.
There are 10 levels of NARTREK achievement, starting with Bronze and progressing through Silver and Gold on to 7 advanced achievement areas such as Super Scale, R&D, Competition, etc. Any NAR member of any age may participate. Juniors under age 18 (whether NAR members or not) may instead choose to participate in the slightly simpler NARTREK Cadet program.
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Range Safety: Trajectory Management
The NAR's comprehensive study of hobby rocket safety in 2005 started by gathering flight statistics from a number of NAR sections that keep detailed flight records. These statistics showed that between 5 and 10 percent of rocket flights have some form of flight anomaly, and that 3/4 of these anomalies are recovery system failures. These failures ranged from "lawn dart" flights to an in-flight separation leading to a piece of a rocket that was supposed to be attached to a recovery device free-falling without one. Recovery system failures generally result in the rocket landing at abnormally high speeds. The kinetic energy of a rocket greater than a few ounces in weight landing at high speed (or a very heavy rocket landing even at normal recovery speeds) is dangerous to people and property, so it is very important to keep rockets landing with high energy away from both of these.
Range safety procedures should always include appropriate "trajectory management" measures. These are measures to try to ensure that when rockets do land with a lot of energy, they are most likely to do this where people and property are NOT. These measures include putting spectator and parking areas crosswind from the launch pads so that rockets do not land on them even during normal recovery; and angling launchers slightly away from the direction of such areas to ensure that ballistic "lawn dart" flights impact in vacant open areas downrange. If rocket boost trajectories are arcing over the heads of your spectators, or rockets are drifting into them on recovery, it's time to take some additional "trajectory management" action to be absolutely sure that no one gets hurt and no property gets damaged. | |
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