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.