US Team Flyoffs
Selection for the 2025 U.S. World Championships Team
Would you like to fly for the USA as a member of one of the two U.S. teams (Junior and Senior) that will compete against over 20 other national teams in the next World Spacemodeling Championships (WSMC), the “Olympics of Rocketry”, in August 2025 in Serbia? The fun, team camaraderie, and excitement of flying for Team USA can be seen in the November-December issue of Sport Rocketry.
The US teams for 2025 were selected at a competitive fly-off held at the opening weekend of NARAM-65 in Colorado, August 3-5. There are 8 events at the WSMC, and each event is flown by a 4-person team of Juniors (age 18 or younger by 2025) and another of Seniors. What international rocketry competition is all about and how to build models for it are explained on the NAR website here. In order to be able to participate in the in-person flyoffs for 5 of the 8 events, fliers must conduct and report the results from locally-observed “qualification flights” in those events sometime between January 1 and June 30, 2024. These results will be posted as received, on the “Team Selection Scoreboard”. The process for conducting and reporting these flights is now open, and the details for how to do it are provided here.
The NAR held a competitive flyoff at the opening weekend (August 3-5) of NARAM 65 in Pueblo, CO to select the members of the Junior and Senior Teams that we will be sending to Serbia to compete. Juniors are those who will not have reached age 19 by December 31, 2025; Seniors are all others. There are 8 event teams of 3-4 people in each of the two age divisions, so there will be plenty of opportunity to win a spot. The US Team Bulletin providing all the details of this flyoff is posted on the NAR website here.
If you want to participate in the team selection flyoffs, for some events it will be necessary to establish and report a qualification flight score in order to earn that eligibility. See this page in the NAR website for details: https://www.nar.org/wsmc-scoreboard/
Lots of information about international competition procedures and designs—which are quite different from NAR competition—are posted in this section of the NAR website.
Recent video presentations at vNARCON 2022 are available on YouTube:
- “Building Paper Rockets” by Steve Kristal
- “Flying the S4 Rocket Glider Event” by Chris Flanigan
- “Streamer and Parachute Duration Secrets” by Steve Kristal
- “Helicopter Duration International Style” by Trip Barber
- “Creating Lightweight Fiberglass Tubes” by James Duffy (S5 Scale Altitude focused)
- “Fabrication of Lightweight Fiberglass Body Tubing” by Terrill Willard (S3/6/9 focused)
- “Flight Testing in The American Rocketry Challenge” by Trip Barber (S2/P focused)
- “Building the Estes 1/100 Scale Saturn 1B” by James Duffy (S7 focused)