This is the 23rd and biggest year in the history of the American Rocketry Challenge (ARC/TARC) program. We have 1,006 registered teams (about 5,000 6th through 12thgraders), the largest number in the history of the NAR’s premier STEM and youth outreach program—well above the previous high of 922, which was last year.
This amazing number is a tribute to the success and appeal of the program, to the publicity efforts of our partners at the Aerospace Industries Association, and to the many NAR members who have done recruiting in person at the local level nationwide. Our challenge now will be to keep up with our success and get all these teams to a successful flight experience.If you have the capacity to mentor one of these teams, please do. Some guidelines for what mentoring is all about are provided on the NAR website here.
Please remind any team that you work with about all of the how-to resources available to them online in the "Resources" (www.rocketcontest.org/resources) page of the ARC website. There are presentations there on the parts of an ARC rocket, on flight testing in ARC, video tutorials on how to build and fly rockets in general, and recordings of the videos hosted by Estes Education covering the contest and how to build and fly for it. While virtual mentoring using resources like these is never as good as in-person, these resources can really help teams -- if they use them. It is also important for teams (and for you!) to read the Team Handbook. which is posted on this page and the program's "https://rocketcontest.org/faq/". I continue to be amazed (and disappointed) by how many teams seem to have never heard of or accessed any of this helpful information despite being told about it when they register.
The most important experience for students in the ARC program is the flight experience. We want this to be positive, successful, and safe. Please help any team that contacts you connect with an NAR section and one of their launches, and please welcome and support any ARC team that shows up to fly at your section's launches.
What the NAR team is doing is really making a difference to the future of the US aerospace industry, to our rocketry hobby, and to the future of the NAR. Thank you if you are playing a part in making this all happen.