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.
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!
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.
One team from Creekview High in Canton, and a team from Creekland Middle School, also in Canton, have been named finalists in the Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) for 2018. The finals will be held in The Plains, Virginia, on Saturday, May 12.
Congratulations to the teams and good luck in the finals.
Back in May of this year, members of SoAR got together and built rockets for the AMC production “Halt and Catch Fire” which was filmed here in Atlanta. Later, Jorge, Roy, and Glenn were on-set for the filming of the scene in which the rockets were launched. That episode, “A Connection is Made” will be shown this Saturday at 9 PM (and repeated at 10:08 PM and 1:46 AM Sunday). Here’s the trailer for the episode.
SoAR participated in a small way in the upcoming fourth and final season of AMC’s drama, “Halt and Catch Fire,” which is produced here in Atlanta, and will start on Saturday, August 19. Check your listings for AMC (the “Walking Dead” channel!).
The episode that SoAR assisted in should air September 16, but that is just a guess based on production order. Production order and airing order are not always the same, and there’s always a chance our scenes could end up in the editing suite bit bucket. We’ll know for sure closer to air date.
In the meantime, if you’re interested you can catch up on the series on Netflix. It is about a group of people who’ve lived and worked together in the computer industry from the dawn of the personal computer in the early 80’s through the beginnings of the World Wide Web in the early 90’s. This season is set in 1994. Warning: this is a drama that deals with adult situations and has strong language.
How is SoAR involved? Well, without giving out spoilers, we can tell you that a number of SoAR members built rockets that are flown by most of the major cast members. Jorge, Roy, and Glenn assisted on the set when the rockets were flown. And… that’s about all we can tell you here until after it airs! Glenn gave an excellent rundown on the SoARChat list, which you may see in other forms later.
So here’s the fourth season trailer: