Team America Rocketry Challenge

The Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC) is the world’s largest student rocket contest and a key piece of the aerospace and defense industry’s strategy to build a stronger U.S. workforce in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). 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.

Approximately 5,000 students from across the nation compete in TARC each year. The contest challenges students to design, build and fly a rocket to safely carry a raw egg payload to a specific altitude and back within a certain amount of time. The contest’s rules and scoring parameters change every cycle to challenge the students’ ingenuity and encourage a fresh approach to rocket design.

The contest is designed to encourage students to study math and science and pursue careers in aerospace. The process of designing, building, and flying a moderately complex flight vehicle teaches many concepts of teamwork as well as those of physics, engineering, aerodynamics, flight mechanics, stability, and electrical circuitry. Through TARC, students learn of engineering design used by scientists and engineers in the real world.

Based on local qualification flights, the top 100 teams are invited to Washington, D.C. in May for the National Finals. Top placing teams split more than $100,000 in cash and scholarships and the overall winning team will travel to Europe to compete in the International Rocketry Challenge taking place at either the Farnborough or Paris Air Show, depending on the year.

Elizabethtown Area High School students enrolled in the Engineering Design course were presented a task by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA has announced that the Space Shuttle Program retired after 30 years of space travel, but America has no spaceship to replace them. After the wheels of the space shuttle roll to a stop for the final time, NASA astronauts will have to rely on Russian spaceships for their rides into space until commercial American vehicles are ready to fly crews to orbit. The Centennial Challenge is a NASA space competition prize contest for any non-government-funded technological achievements by American teams to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks and return safely.The competition is aimed to spur development of a low-cost spaceflight that has a short launch turnaround and play a big roll in NASA's space exploration for the next decade.

 

The competition was open to single-staged model rockets that carry, as a totally enclosed payload, one raw USDA Large hen’s egg. The purpose of this competition was to carry an exceedingly fragile payload for as long a time as possible and to recover the payload to the ground without damage. Several students achieved this task and develop their creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills necessary for 21st Century learning.

NEW FLIGHT DURATION SCHOOL RECORD

Jonathan Gartley
85.10 secs.