Mar 12, 2019
SoAR has an opportunity to try out a new field that can possibly eventually be used for small high power launches.
We’ll start today, Sunday, March 24 from 10AM to 5PM with a Low/Mid power launch at the Creekside Firing Range located in Taylorsville, GA, west of Cartersville. This is within a couple of miles of where SoAR got its start in 1997!
Launches at this field will only be held on Sundays, as this is the only day the firing range is closed. There are EXTREMELY IMPORTANT RESTRICTIONS on recovery that, if violated, will get you banned from SoAR AND possibly from clubs across the Southeast. We can’t stress enough how important this is.
If a rocket lands south of the field in the adjoining sod farm, it should be considered LOST FOREVER*. The sod farm has made it clear that NO ONE goes on its property for any reason.
We’ve now been told we have permission to recover from the sod farm, by foot only.
From April to October, corn will be planted on a large part of the field, which will limit its usefulness, but we may schedule other low/mid power launches during this time. If a rocket lands in the corn, it should be considered LOST FOREVER*. During months when the corn has been harvested (November to March), that area is fair recovery area. This is when the field will operate as a high power field (except this launch, as we don’t yet have a waiver).
* We are attempting to work out ways in which we can get wayward rockets back from the landowners. Let us deal with this. Do not attempt to contact the landowners yourself.
WEATHER UPDATE: Looks to be a beautiful day, mostly sunny, mid 50’s when we start but peaking at nearly 75 degrees by the time we wrap up. Winds will be five to eight MPH mainly from the south, so the sod farm probably won’t come into play anyway.
Here are the directions to Creekside Firing Range:
- From Atlanta, take I-75 North to exit 285, Red Top Mountain Rd. and turn left.
- Continue as it merges with Old Alabama Road SE.
- After about five miles, turn right on to GA 61 (you’ll have Cartersville Airport on your right).
- After about a mile, turn left onto GA 113.
- After about five miles, turn right on to Covered Bridge Road.
- In half a mile, turn left onto Old Alabama Rd. SW.
- In just over three miles, Creekside Firing Range will be on your left.
Jul 29, 2017
(minor updates, April 2017) A dilemma faced by many: “I, or my son or daughter, received a model rocket for Christmas (or birthday, or graduation, or other occasion). Where do we go to launch it?” So here is a very short guide to flying a model rocket in the metro Atlanta area.
First of all, know that most park systems in the metro area have rules against flying objects of all types. Sometimes you can go fly a rocket or two in your local park, but at some point a friendly police officer will come by and say you can’t do that. That said, there is one park where we have gotten assurances that model rockets are allowed: Garrard Landing Park on Holcomb Bridge Rd near the Chattahoochee River. The entrance to the park is in front of the Johns Creek Environmental Campus; just follow the signs back to the park. Garrard Landing is suitable for the average Estes beginner rockets.
Schools, church athletic fields, and, of course, private property can sometimes be used if you approach the appropriate people first.
The best advice we can give is for you to wait and attend one of SoAR’s launches, where you don’t have to worry about permission, or even whether your launch equipment works, since we provide it, along with free recovery wadding! We try to have two launches a month, usually one in Alpharetta for smaller model rockets, and one at another location for all model rockets. And then we have our GRITS launch in south Georgia at Thanksgiving for rockets of all types.
And keep checking the web site. You never know when we’ll find other locations where we can fly.
Jul 20, 2018
The Creekview High Grizzlies Rocket Team won the 2018 International Rocketry Challenge held Friday in London, UK.
They came within three feet of the target altitude of 800′, in all achieving the lowest score of nine, while scoring fifty points for their presentation on Thursday. That was good enough to beat the teams from the UK, France, and Japan. More details when available.
Article from Raytheon.com, sponsors of the team.
Jun 1, 2018
Buh-Bye… to Yahoo! After almost nineteen years of discussions on OneList, which became eGroups, which became YahooGroups, a complete switch has been made to Groups.io. While it looks very similar to Yahoogroups, Groups.io has a smoother, faster interface and is simpler to maintain for a club like SoAR.
One huge advantage is that subscriptions are no longer tied to Yahoo email accounts, eliminating an often confusing step in getting a new member subscribed. Any email address will work with Groups.io which makes it much simpler for us to invite users into the system. Also big is the idea of sub-groups, allowing our two-tiered member/non-member system to work more naturally. We had SoARChat, which was open to anyone, but it was separate from SoARBusiness, which was for members-only. Some members only subscribed to SoARChat, while others only subscribed to SoARBusiness, meaning that a message that had to go to everyone had to be sent twice, once on each group. Now, anything sent to main@soarrocketry.groups.io (which replaces SoARChat) is seen by everyone in members@soarrocketry.groups.io (which replaces SoARBusiness) as well.
So, anyone who wants to talk rockets with us can go to soarrocketry.groups.io and join, even if you aren’t a SoAR member. If you then become a SoAR member, we’ll simply add you to the members group where we’ll handle topics that are for SoAR members only.
All the old messages, photos, and files from the YahooGroups are also in the soarrocketry.groups.io page (well, except for about 1000 messages that a previous SoAR Secretary accidentally erased!) and they have a better user interface to boot!
May 12, 2018
The rules for
Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) are generally this: to fly one or more Raw Large hen’s eggs to a certain altitude, and recover them undamaged within a certain time range using a rocket that is limited in power and size. The key to winning the TARC is to score low and be able to do it consistently.
That is just what the team from Creekview High School in Canton, GA did to win the 2018 TARC Finals Saturday in The Plains, Virginia. While they scored 8.92 on their first flight, seven teams scored lower. On the second flight, Creekview scored just a little higher, 12.28, while most of their rivals missed by dozens of points, leaving Creekview on top at the end of the day to be only the second school in the country to win two TARC Championships (Creekview also won in 2014). The second place team was last year’s winner, Festus High School from Missouri, and the 2015 winner, the team from Russellville, AL, came in third. Ninety-nine teams participated in this year’s finals out of 401 teams that flew qualification flights.
Creekview will now be going in July to the Farnborough Air Show in London, UK courtesy of Raytheon Company to fly against the winners of the TARC-like events in the UK, France, and Japan. And they collected $21,000 of the overall prize pool of $100,000 that was split across the top 10 teams.
Sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) and the National Association of Rocketry (NAR), TARC was created in the fall of 2002 as a one-time celebration of the Centennial of Flight, but by popular demand became an annual program.
The rules for the 2019 TARC have been announced, and they have an Apollo 11 theme! Rockets are limited to 80 newton/seconds power (that’s roughly an average of eighteen pounds of thrust for one second or nine pounds of thrust for two seconds). They must be at least two feet long and weigh less than 1.5 pounds at liftoff, and they must carry three eggs (there’s the Apollo angle!) recovered by two or more parachutes.
