American Rocketry Challenge

Photo by Jim Wilkerson.

American Rocketry Challenge
2025 Registration (December 2024)

The American Rocketry Challenge (ARC) 2025 registration deadline has just been extended from December 1 to December 8 to give school teams a chance to finish their registrations after coming back from Thanksgiving.

The NAR’s role in ARC is to provide volunteers to work with student teams, particularly teams in their first year in the program with no prior rocketry experience, to help them learn how to build and safely fly rockets.   The NAR volunteers who do this are called “mentors” and a list of these volunteers is provided to teams when they register.  We are always looking for additional volunteers from all across the US to do this, so if you have some rocketry background and would like to help, please contact the NAR’s ARC Manager, Trip Barber. Background information on what being a mentor is all about is posted on the NAR website’s ARC page.Somewhere between 150 and 200 of the teams that register this year are looking for mentor support.  A list of these teams and their contact information will be sent in early January to the NAR members who are officially signed up as mentors.

Another key NAR contribution to the program is to provide teams with a place to fly and the launch equipment to fly from.  This is done by the many NAR sections across the US.  Please welcome these ARC teams to your launch site and help them learn how to fly safely.  This typically starts happening in February and continues until the ARC qualification flight deadline of April 7.

American Rocketry Challenge
2025 Registration (October 2024)

Registration is open for the 2024-2025 edition of the American Rocketry Challenge (ARC), the NAR’s premier youth rocketry program, and will remain open until December 1. Partnered with the Aerospace Industries Association, the NAR has been sponsoring this model rocket challenge competition for 6th through 12th grade student teams since 2002. Over 16,000 teams with over 95,000 student team members have competed for the program’s $100,000 prize pool over those years, and it has been very successful in its mission of attracting young people to the NAR and to careers in aerospace. Registration and program details can be found at the event website here.

ARC challenges student teams to design, build, and fly a single-stage model rocket carrying two raw eggs to an altitude of exactly 790 feet with a flight duration of 41 to 44 seconds, and recover the eggs safely (and unbroken) by parachute. The rockets have to meet certain dimension and other requirements that are specified in the program rules here.

One critical part of the program’s success over the years has been local team recruiting by NAR members. A handout explaining the event for use in recruiting is posted on the NAR website’s American Rocketry Challenge page.

The second critical part of the program’s success has been local support by NAR members in mentoring teams and by NAR sections in providing teams the opportunity to fly at their launches. If you are an adult NAR member who would like to consider volunteering as one of our more than 400 mentors nationwide, you can see what this involves at this summary on the NAR website. If you’d like to be added to the mentor list, contact the NAR’s ARC Manager, Trip Barber at ahbarber@cox.net.

American Rocketry Challenge 2024 & 2025 (June 2024)

The American Rocketry Challenge is the NAR’s premier STEM outreach program.  In its 22 years it has enrolled over 16,000 teams of 6th-12th grade students, over 95,000 students in all.  The program ends each school year with a national championship flyoff among the top 100 teams nationwide.  This is flown at Great Meadow in The Plains, VA.  This year it rained hard on the primary date, so the event was postponed to the backup date, Sunday May 19.  For this year’s 2024 program a team of 8 students from Tharptown High School in Russellville, Alabama was crowned National Champion as the result of two nearly perfect flights at the Finals (a two-flight combined score of 4)! They will be going to the Farnborough (England) Air Show in July as the guests of RTX (Raytheon) where they will fly against the winning teams from the ARC-equivalent programs in the UK, France, and Japan.

Teams at the National Finals represented 25 states from Washington state to Florida and competed for a total of $100,000 in prize money and scholarships. The prize pool was split among the Top 10 teams and winners of the Marketing Competition, Presentation Competition, and some other smaller events.  The Tharptown students took home $20,000 for 1st place as U.S. champions. Additionally, the top 25 finishers received an invitation to participate in NASA’s Student Launch initiative to continue their exploration of rocketry with high-powered rockets and challenging mission parameters.

As a special treat to the Finalists, NASA Astronaut Woody Hoburg, an alumnus of the 2003 program (where his team finished 10th) spent the entire day on the field and talked to every team.  He had talked to the 2023 participants last year from the International Space Station.

The full results of 2024 are posted online at https://www.rocketcontest.org/result/2024/

Key elements of the upcoming ARC 2025 challenge are:

  • Same dimension, weight, and motor power limits as always
  • Altitude goal 790 feet for qualification (will be different for the Finals)
  • Duration window 41-44 seconds
  • Two eggs, which must be flown “sideways”
  • Must use two different body diameters (no less than 6 inches of each): top part large enough to hold a 60mm egg slideways and the bottom part no larger than a T-70 tube
  • Must recover in two separate sections, each by parachute
  • Allowed altimeters: Perfectflite Pnut and Firefly; and Jolly Logic Altimeter ONE or TWO (but not THREE)
  • Finals on May 17, 2025 and qual flight deadline April 7.

The full rules for the ARC 2025 will be posted on the event website www.rocketcontest.org when registration opens on June 3, 2024.

Thank you to the 117-person NAR volunteer range crew and our AIA partners. Thanks as well to all the teachers, mentors, and parents who supported all the teams for the ARC 2024 challenge throughout the year. And congratulations to all the teams who travelled to Great Meadow to fly!

Stay safe,
Trip Barber
NAR 4322 L3
ARC Manager

American Rocketry Challenge
2024 – The Biggest Ever (March 2024)

When American Rocketry Challenge 2024 registration closed out, the program enrolled 922 teams of 6th through 12th graders from 45 states this year (click here for list of teams), the largest enrollment in the 22-year history of the program. This is the premier “pay it forward” outreach program of the NAR, the way that we build our membership of the future, and thanks to sustained support from throughout the NAR and from the US aerospace industry, it is doing great.

It is the time in the program’s annual cycle where teams need to be flying if they expect to be successful; there is only a month remaining before the April 8 deadline for submission of qualification flights. There is a strong role here for every NAR section by providing welcoming, support, and flight opportunity at your flying site. Remember that teams can only make three “official” qualification flight attempts and these must be declared to an official NAR adult-member flight observer before liftoff. We will count the best two scores (or the only two scores if teams submit only two, which they can do) toward the ranking that will determine which 100 teams get an invitation to come to the May 18 National Finals. The rankings are based on the SUM of the two best scores, so teams must have no less than two scores on the books to be eligible. The score-reporting form is located HERE on the ARC program website www.rocketcontest.org.

The ARC National Finals will be held the weekend of May 17-19 at Great Meadow, in The Plains, VA, 45 miles west of Washington, DC. The 100 best teams from across the nation will compete there head-to-head for the $100,000 in program prizes. It takes an NAR range crew of about 115 volunteers to put on this large, complex, tightly-scheduled event and this NAR team needs about 10 more volunteers to fill out the roster. If you’re interested in being part of the team that puts on this event, please contact the NAR ARC Manager, Trip Barber, at ahbarber@cox.net, preferably by March 15.

American Rocketry Challenge 2024:
The Largest Ever (January 2024)

The American Rocketry Challenge (ARC, formerly known as TARC) has more registered teams this year than ever before in its 22-year history: more than the 900 that were enrolled in 2020. This brings the total of teams that have enrolled over this history to over 16,000. This is great news for the ARC program and for the future of our hobby, the NAR, and the US aerospace industry. The near-final list of teams is posted HERE.

Many of these teams will be coming to NAR launches over the next several months to practice-launch and then to fly their official local qualification flights (which must be done by April 8) in order to try to get flight scores that will earn one of the 100 spots at the National Finals on May 18 and a chance at the program’s $100,000 in prize money. ARC is the NAR’s most successful “pay forward” program, our best opportunity to pass along the skills, enthusiasm, and culture of safety that are the hallmarks of the NAR. Please help these teams learn the skills of safe rocket-flying and support them when they ask to come fly with you. You can read more about the program and this year’s program rules at the event website, www.rocketcontest.org

2024 American Rocketry Challenge (November 2023)

The registration deadline for the 2024 American Rocketry Challenge (ARC) is December 1. This is the NAR’s premier pay-forward STEM program, offering teams of 6th through 12th graders the opportunity to compete for $100,000 in prizes – but you have to register first! Teams can have 3 to 10 members, and membership can be changed after initial registration, up until the team’s first official qualification flight. So if your team has all the required forms for at least three members, go ahead and register then add others later if you need to. For registration, how-to-resources, and other information about the event go to the event website www.rocketcontest.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

American Rocketry Challenge 2024 Registration Opens (September 2023)

Schools are back in session, vacations are over, so it’s time to get busy with the 2024 American Rocketry Challenge (ARC), the NAR’s premier STEM program and the world’s largest student rocketry competition.  Registration opened in June and remains open until December 1.  Go to the event website www.rocketcontest.org and get started!  NAR members are our best recruiting source to get the word out to schools and youth groups about this program and we count on them to mentor teams in rocketry skills.

The ARC is a design-build-fly program where student teams of three to ten 6th through 12th graders compete to achieve the year’s flight performance goals with their egg-lofting rockets and be one of the top 100 teams that are invited to come fly in the National Finals on May 18, 2024 in The Plains, VA for a chance to win $100,000 in prizes and, for the overall winning team, a free trip to the Farnborough Air Show in England.  Each year about 800 teams (4500 students) enter from all across the US.

Here are the key elements of the 2024 challenge; complete program rules are on the event website and on the NAR website page for the event, https://www.nar.org/team-america/

  • Same dimension (650mm minimum length), weight (650 grams maximum liftoff), and motor power limits (80 N-sec) as always
  • Altitude goal 820 feet for qualification (different for the Finals)
  • Duration window 43-46 seconds
  • One raw egg payload, any orientation
  • Must use two different body diameters (no less than 6 inches of each): top part no larger than T-70 and the bottom part no smaller than 63.5mm (bigger than T-70 but a bit less than T-80)
  • All parts must recover connected together under parachute
  • Allowed altimeters: Perfectflite Pnut and Firefly; Jolly Logic Altimeter ONE or TWO (but not THREE)