Explorer Post 1010
Lockheed Martin Exploring Program

Team America
Rocketry Challenge 2007
 		  
 
Team 1 - 5118
Mark Mendelevitz (lead)
Ben Austin
Paul Choe
Marcus Lima
Adam Brock
Seth Reeder
Arleen Thukral
Drew Hoelscher
Seth Gordon
Chris Fann
 
Team 2 - 5119
James Brent (lead)
Anthony Morales
Chris Muller
 
Team 3 - 5456
Doug Aebig (lead)
Luke Paul
David Sookhar
 

We entered three teams in the 2007 national Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC). The main challenge web site is http://www.aia-aerospace.org/aianews/features/team_america/.  All three teams qualified and were invited to the National Fly Off in May.  At the Fly Off, our teams came in 24th, 25th, and 34th -- not bad out of 690 teams from across the country.  We are starting to plan for TARC 2008, which we will win!

Teams

Last year we had 20 members on two rocket teams. This year we started with 26, but are now down to 16 active participants.  We set up three teams. To be on a team you must be a dues paying member of Post 1010 and have your parents sign the permission form (web format, Word format). You could switch teams up until the qualification flights around the end of March. Each team has a leader and several sub groups. Each team built several rockets, including backups for their best models.

Workshops and Launches

We met during normal Exploring Program meetings on Wednesdays and also on Saturdays for work sessions and launches.  Our initial meeting was in late August 2006.

Our testing launches were at the Old National Pike Park, east of New Market, Maryland (directions).  Their launch calendar and other information is at http://www.narhams.org/.  We also traveled to the Great Meadows (directions, site map) site, near The Plains, Virginia, off I66, west of Manassas, to finish our qualification launches. The calendar for that site is at http://www.novaar.org.

We always need parents to drive to the launch sites and to bring snacks.

Here is a summary of our test fights up to our qualification flights on March 31.

Wind speed is a big problem with our rockets, so we check http://www.usairnet.com/cgi-bin/launch/code.cgi before we launch.
Workshops/Launches
Subsystems

Resources

The Internet and email are a very important resource for our team. Each member should sign up for the TARC Yahoo Group and review the recent emails and files.

Mr. Ekman entered a contest sponsored by the American Association of Physics Teachers to describe how the TARC experience in terms of a high school physics lesson plan.  He won first place in the Informal Instruction Division.  Here is his report (Word, PDF).

TARC Information

Team Information

 
Copyright 2007 Lockheed Martin Exploring Program
Updated: July 1, 2007