Happy 50th Birthday NAR !
Over the past twelve months we have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the hobby and the incorporation of what is now our National Association of Rocketry by the late G. Harry Stine. We were the world’s first organization of hobbyists committed to the safe form of non-professional rocketry that was called “model rocketry” back then, and has since grown to become “sport rocketry”. We started what has become a global hobby with dozens of national organizations and millions of rocket fliers. We have a lot to be proud of, and on this 50th anniversary it’s appropriate to think back on all that we have done as an organization, and give ourselves a pat on the back.
G. Harry Stine recognized the problem, and working first with Orville Carlisle and later with Vern Estes he found the solution. By using reliable and professionally-made rocket motors in reusable and lightweight paper, plastic, and balsa vehicles, young people could experience the thrill of rocket flight without the danger. Harry also recognized that the fledgling hobby needed a national non-profit consumer organization to serve as its advocate with public safety officials; to develop basic national standards such as a user’s Safety Code and safety standards for rocket motors; and to provide a way for individuals to join together to conduct contests, launches and fellowship and to exchange technical information. This was why the NAR came into being, and these remain the core reasons that we continue to exist.
Fifty years ago sport rockets were four fins and a paper body with a B motor, and that’s it. After fifty years of research, development, and information exchange, much of it by NAR members and published in our magazines and journals, look where we are today! We have models that are every shape and size imaginable and recover by everything from glider wings to rotor blades to complex electronically-deployed parachute systems, all developed by our members. We understand stability, accurately predict flight altitudes, and use advanced composites in construction. Hundreds of different sizes of rocket motors are commercially available, all of them fully safe and certified to standards that we developed, and to which we test motors before they can be sold in the US.
Fifty years ago amateur rocketry was considered a menace to public safety. Thanks to countless hours of technical effort by our members in developing rigorous safety codes and national standards, and even more hours of working with legislators and public safety officials from every state and local jurisdiction, our hobby today is a recognized part of school and youth group programs across the US and is legal virtually everywhere. We have partnered with NASA, the military, CAP, 4-H, Scouts, and the aerospace industry to support and popularize our hobby with young people, and working with all of them now run the world’s largest youth-outreach rocket competition. We have run safe and thrilling demonstration launches in front of millions of people, on national TV, and at major public events. We compete and cooperate internationally. Our members are astronauts, run aerospace companies, and occupy positions of leadership in government and the military. We are the face of the hobby for America, and its leaders.
This July 26th we celebrated our heritage and history with a fantastic “Old Rocketeers Reunion” at NARAM-50 in Manassas, Virginia. Over 300 long-time and long-ago NAR members joined together for an evening of celebration and reminiscence. Thanks to the hard work of the event organizers Jennifer Ash-Poole and John Hochheimer, and to John Langford’s generous hospitality with the hangar of his aerospace company Aurora Flight Sciences, we had a party to remember. We deserved it. We are the National Association of Rocketry; we are where it all started and it’s because of all of us and what we have accomplished and contributed together and individually that the hobby is where it is today. Let’s celebrate where we’ve been, and commit ourselves to making the next fifty years in our hobby as memorable as its first. Happy 50th birthday, NAR, now on to 100!