Tag: science

New year updates

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New year’s day: seems like a good time for some updates.

man with facial hair and glasses wearing black jacket standing and smiling at camera with green trees in background
during a brief trip to ojai

To say I’ve been busy lately would be a dramatic understatement. Even aside from the pandemic and the general chaos it has created, 2021 has been a pretty crazy year for me. At this time 1 year ago, we were living in the Seattle area and our daughter hadn’t been born yet. Fast forward to today, and she is 11 months old, and we are living in Los Angeles (with another big cross country move to come in another few months).

During 2021 I can’t say I accomplished much in rocketry, but I did take several classes at local community colleges: a chemistry prep course; the full chemistry course with lab; a geology class about dinosaurs; and linear (matrix) algebra. In 2019, I took the three-part calculus series, and linear algebra was the first post-calculus math class I’ve ever taken. I’d like to eventually get an engineering degree and these are just math and science pre-requisites, but regardless of whether I ultimately get the degree, I just enjoy learning – and these are some tough classes that really force me to do some hard work and expand my mind.

Since arriving in Los Angeles about six months ago, we’ve also made an effort to get out and explore the local area – with the important caveats that this is taking place during a global pandemic and we have a baby. We’ve made it to San Diego, Santa Barbara, Ojai, and Big Bear Lake within a few hours’ drive of LA; several beaches, many hikes, and a few botanical gardens; and much more. Most recently we just visited the California Science Center, which has an awesome space exhibit and actually houses one of the (now retired) space shuttles. I’ll post more about this exhibit shortly!

NAR Rocket Science Achievement Award

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

  1. Mile Marker
  2. Faster Than Sound, and
  3. 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!