NAR Rocket Science Achievement Award

The National Association of Rocketry (“NAR”) has established a “Rocket Science Achievement Award” program, which currently has three categories of awards:

Mile Marker
Faster Than Sound, and
Data Downlink.

rocket launching with cloud of smoke underneath — Darkstar Extreme on Dark Matter “sparky” motor

The awards are pretty straightforward: to achieve Mile Marker, you need to fly a rocket to at least 1 mile (5,280 ft), and you can get additional awards for 2 or 3 miles, or as many as you’d like, in one-mile increments. To achieve Faster Than Sound, you just have to fly a rocket at a speed that is Mach 1.0 or higher. And the Data Downlink award involves real-time telemetry for data beyond just basic altitude and acceleration.

For any of these awards, you have to have documentation of the flight data, including a copy of the data file from a commercial flight computer. If you submit this documentation and it’s accepted, you’ll be awarded a high quality printed certificate and your name will be added to the NAR website, which is pretty cool.

I recently achieved the Mile Marker award when I flew my Darkstar Extreme rocket to 7,579 ft AGL. I plan on even higher flights in the future, of course, and I’d like to try to achieve an award in each of the three categories that NAR established. The data downlink one should be the most interesting and will require a bit of creativity.

In case you’re interested, the award page is here!