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Gretchen Cook-Anderson
Headquarters, Washington             May 6, 2003
(Phone: 202/358-0836)

Jerry Berg
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
(Phone: 256/544-0034)

RELEASE: 03-158

"ALL SYSTEMS GO" FOR STUDENT ROCKETRY CHALLENGE

     More than 1,000 students, from 100 high schools in 36 
states and Washington, are gathering in The Plains, Va., to 
compete in the Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC).

The inaugural event, May 10, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. EDT, 
at Great Meadows racetrack, offers student teams awards 
worth $59,000. Student teams must build a two-stage rocket, 
that can fly to at least 1,500 feet, release a payload of 
two raw eggs, and parachute the eggs back to Earth unbroken, 
to win the event. 

The world's largest model rocket contest is a national 
amateur competition for high school students. The contest 
resulted from a partnership between NASA and TARC sponsors, 
the Aerospace Industries Association and the National 
Association of Rocketry.

The event is being held in conjunction with the national 
yearlong Centennial of Flight celebration, which 
commemorates the Wright Brothers historic, first successful 
powered flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., Dec. 17, 1903.

Speakers and participants at TARC include: NASA 
Administrator Sean O'Keefe; U.S. Senator Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.); 
Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), 
Huntsville, Ala., Art Stephenson; and U.S. Centennial of 
Flight Commission Chairman and Smithsonian National Air and 
Space Museum, Washington, Director J.R. (Jack) Dailey.

NASA engineer and author Homer Hickam, whose book inspired 
the movie "October Sky" and, Jay Apt, a veteran NASA 
astronaut, who flew four times as a Space Shuttle mission 
specialist, are also attending. Apt will be a range-safety 
officer for the competition. 

An original field of entrants, nearly 900 high school teams 
and more than 9,000 students, was narrowed during regional 
fly-offs to the top 100 teams. The top 10 teams will be 
eligible to submit proposals to participate in the 2004 
Student Launch Initiative (SLI) at the MSFC. 

The SLI, now in its third year, is an educational program to 
motivate students toward careers in science, math and 
engineering. Under the guidance of MSFC engineers and 
mentors, SLI lets high school student teams experience 
hands-on, practical aerospace and engineering activities. 
The student teams build reusable launch vehicles, which 
carry a science experiment payload up to an altitude of one 
mile. Up to three proposals will be selected to participate 
in the SLI. Finalists will also be eligible to receive an 
invitation to attend Space Camp at the U.S. Space & Rocket 
Center in Huntsville.

In July a faculty member from each of the top 25 TARC teams 
will be invited to the Initiative Workshop at MSFC. They 
will attend classes on student rocketry with NASA scientists 
and tour research facilities.

The futuristic Starship 2040 traveling exhibit, designed to 
share NASA's vision of what future commercial space flight 
might be like, will be at the TARC and open to visitors. The 
exhibit showcases futuristic propulsion and space science 
technologies in development by NASA and its partners. The 
exhibit demonstrates the real-world challenges of achieving 
routine travel beyond Earth orbit, and portrays what space 
travel may be like in 2040. 

For information about the Team America Rocket Challenge, the 
Student Launch Initiative or Starship 2040, on the Internet, 
visit: 

http://www.rocketcontest.org

http://education.msfc.nasa.gov/sli 

http://www.starship2040.com

For more information about NASA on the Internet, visit: 

http://www.nasa.gov

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