We had a special guest drop by at the beginning of our meeting! Dr. David Robertson, Physics Professor at Otterbein University, stayed after his last class to see how we liked our “new digs”. Dave shared his appreciation of our alliance and thinks that more students will get involved as word spreads of our presence on campus. Oh, and we REALLY appreciate our “new digs”.
CORSA members elected our first board of directors. All nominees were acclaimed (unopposed). Our new and first leadership team is:
Director – Lloyd N. NAR 97987
Deputy Director – Joe P. NAR 83768
Recording/Financial Officer – Ed H. NAR 71396
Senior Adviser – Paul D. NAR 26702
We have narrowed our LPR/MPR launch site search down to three possibilities. Lloyd has already begun contacting the municipal entities that own the sites. While we all have “go fever” it’s important for us to stay focused on securing a site as a responsible community partner. We will not fly without permission and then ask for forgiveness. We are taking the responsible and more challenging path of building alliances with land owners (public and private) to secure sites we can use on a consistent basis. It might take a little longer to secure a site, but in the end we will have a working partnership that hopefully should ensure we can remain welcome guests for the long run.
Our rocket discussion was “Hidden Gems of the NAR Web Site”. We reviewed logging in and how to update our personal information. The members only access to R&D reports had members ooing and ahhing until we had mental overload. There is SO MUCH information in this area it would take months to read it all. The safety area of the web site has been updated and provides easy access to a lot of valuable information. Most of the reports are on high power safety but the principals found within them can be applied to low and mid power as well. In the education area we had a brief review of the NARTREK program and TARC which will be a major outreach objective once we have a launch site. Last, but not least, we explored the competition area.
MARCH MEETING PREVIEW! – Open Rocket overview with Ed! Flying rockets is fun, building kits is more fun, and modifying the kits is even better, but the ultimate prize is to fly your own original design. OpenRocket is a free, fully featured model rocket simulator that allows you to design and simulate your rockets before actually building and flying them.” You can down load Open Rocket for free from their web site: http://openrocket.sourceforge.net/
You can view the meeting presentation here: CORSA 02_2016 February Meeting