Increase In Interest?

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SteveA

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Has anyone noted an increase in interest in rocketry by younger folks in the wake of the Falcon Heavy launch and other emerging space news? I had a discussion with someone regarding the lackluster interest that I have had with kids and rocketry and his thoughts were that recent events may be shifting interest back toward it. I hope he's right. I really enjoyed teaching rocketry to the kids,but the experiences from the past few years has left that desire tepid.

Thanks!
Steve
 
TARC tweeted this on January 17, before the FH launch:
***
Team America Rocketry Challenge‏ @RocketContest Jan 17
The tally is finally done, and thanks to everyone that has registered. This year, #TARC2018 has the highest number of students participating since 2006! Thanks to the nearly 4,600 of you all that will be competing!
***

2006 was shortly before the big recession hit. People I’ve talked to in the hobby business are attributing the increased interest/attendance to the current robust economy.

Anecdotally, our LPR field has increased attendance from families with young kids. Our onsite vendor has seen trends of his business increasing. I ask people what brought them out and the common answer is they did it when they were kids and thought their own kids would enjoy it. If I have time to talk to them eventually SpaceX comes up, but nobody’s mentioned it as the reason they’ve come. Although I will say people I know who aren’t into rocketry will bring up the FH launch, specifically the Tesla Roadster and the simultaneous booster landings. So it certainly got people’s attention.

There’s been success setting records for flights by college teams, so there’s some interest at the college level too.

What experiences did you have in the past few years that left you tepid?
 
The two clubs I launch with are predominately males over the age of 50. All of the launches I've been to over the last 5 years had, at most, 1 or 2 people under the age of 20 actively participating.

I have noticed groups of college students at quite a few launches. It's usually a group of 8 to 10 students, a mentor and a rocket that is barely flight worthy. I see more failures during these flights than anything. I don't anticipate any of these students continuing with rocketry after college.

Unfortunately I see this hobby becoming esoteric once the baby boomers and early gen-x'ers are gone.
 
The two clubs I launch with are predominately males over the age of 50. All of the launches I've been to over the last 5 years had, at most, 1 or 2 people under the age of 20 actively participating.

I have noticed groups of college students at quite a few launches. It's usually a group of 8 to 10 students, a mentor and a rocket that is barely flight worthy. I see more failures during these flights than anything. I don't anticipate any of these students continuing with rocketry after college.

Unfortunately I see this hobby becoming esoteric once the baby boomers and early gen-x'ers are gone.

Interesting that you see a lot of failures from the college crowd. Our club has had 3 SLI launches so far, with 2 successes and one partial failure due to altimeter malfunction (main at apogee due to a damaged Stratologger)

-A high school student with an L1
 
Interesting that you see a lot of failures from the college crowd. Our club has had 3 SLI launches so far, with 2 successes and one partial failure due to altimeter malfunction (main at apogee due to a damaged Stratologger)

-A high school student with an L1


(I'm self editing my previous post that was here briefly.)

They try hard and appear to have fun. They just seem to have trouble with execution.
 
The two clubs I launch with are predominately males over the age of 50. All of the launches I've been to over the last 5 years had, at most, 1 or 2 people under the age of 20 actively participating.
[...]
Unfortunately I see this hobby becoming esoteric once the baby boomers and early gen-x'ers are gone.

The observation above is not far off the mark, but I disagree with the conclusion.
You will see why in a moment.

Last year I had actively attended launches with 2 local clubs, with longer (once a year) drives to 2 additional clubs.
One of the two local clubs always draws a good sized crowd of 15-40 people throughout the launch day, with 1-3 families with kids in attendance in additional to the usual assortment of white males over 40.
The second local club frequently cancels launch dates, or bails on them early if no-one arrives within the first 30 minutes of launch opening time in the morning. Guess what my family does? We come to the 2nd club's site with our local launch equipment, and by mid-day usually have another 1-3 other families with kids come and join us to launch rockets off our pad. The families who come out and launch with us have fun at the family-friendly times of the day, when the official club chieftains are long gone. The official "club" reports that no-one showed up for launch.

We also hold impromptu low-power launches at the local HS's athletic field, and at a local park, and coordinate with other families and cub scout packs who want to gather and have fun launching rockets. Works well, and everyone has fun, but you will never see any sign of this activity on the NAR or Tripoli "books", "reports", or membership rosters.

Thus, if you were to come out to the official launches with the second "club" - you would conclude that the hobby is dead, and no-one shows up to the launch days. That club still exists, but mostly in (very well regarded, award winning) newsletter form.
If you come out to the launches with the first club - you will conclude that the hobby is doing just fine.
However, if you find us launching rockets with local kids, you might surmise that the hobby is prospering and growing like crazy.

Draw your own conclusions.

a
 
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I launch with two clubs, and we're pretty fortunate. The smaller club, SARG, attracts a lot of scout groups, and we've had at times 50 or more Cub Scouts attend a launch. They also attract a local TARC team or two. The bigger club, LUNAR, is the largest NAR section in the country by number of members. We routinely have over 100 cars, and I'm guessing 200-300 people. Lots of families, lots of kids. We have 12 low power pads, 6 mid power, and 12 high power. There are usually several TARC teams in attendance, as well.
 
I gotta say, LUNAR does it right. They were on my radar for a long time since it's hard to launch around here without a club, and my 8 year old daughter's positive reaction to the SpaceX launches and my 6 year old son's ability to do longer car trips without too much complaint led me to take just her to the last couple hours of a LUNAR launch just to see her reaction and they couldn't have been more welcoming. They got her a free completed rocket, showed her how to do every step of launch prep, she did a couple of launches, and man they set the hook good. We built some rockets and went out with the whole family and everybody had a good time, and we got home they each got to pick out one more to build. So far so good on the whole process.
 
This is what has been my experience and perhaps,it's merely a function of where I am located (Small town in Western Kansas population a little over 2000). However, for the past almost ten years I have taught rocketry through my library. It began small,but then blossomed into a program that included participation by entire families. In fact, among the siblings,it became a right of passage. It was not uncommon for my program to involve a total of 30-40 kids bewteen the basic and advanced groups. I thought I had hit upon something special. Then, in the past past three years, when the last of those core families moved onto Middle School and High School, the participation wained significantly. I was no longer getting kids who showed an interest in what they were doing, rather, I was getting kids whose parents used the course to dump off their kids and kids, who seldom finished their rockets or never came back for them when they did. Thus,my tepid feelings for continuation of teaching rocketry.

I guess, overall, what I am trying conclude here is if this is an anomoly and not a widespread trend and if I should continue forging ahead in hopes that the program will again be populated with kids who want to learn and have fun. It was such an abrupt shift it sort of left me flat footed. I don'tknow what sets these kidds on fire. I even offer CAD, 3D printing,and programming with Arduino...Nothing.

Thanks for the input guys.

I teach the first course Saturday (in another town) Maybe I can walk away here today, a little more inspired.
 
Wow. First of all as a fellow rocketeer, thanks for doing the lessons. That sounds awesome. You were obviously doing something right to get that much participation.

As soon as I read that the kids were going into middle school, my reaction was “yep”. Seems like that’s when they bail. Sports, girls, cars, video games and whatnot pushes the rockets aside (since you’re in a small town, maybe there aren’t many new kids to take the place of the outgoing?) Then they come back 20 years later as a BAR. If you’re still in town and in the hobby when that 20 years is up, I’ll bet anything you get them all back and their kids too.

This hobby has ebbs and flows and you’re probably just experiencing an ebb in your town. I’d guess in a few years (not 20) people will remember how much fun they had with SteveA’s rocket group and you’ll get bunches of people again. Hopefully the SpaceX publicity helps spur that. And even if it doesn’t you did a great thing for a generation of kids in your town.

Your experience reminds me of a friend who’s a high school teacher in a town of Iowa with a population of maybe 10K. 5 years ago she was approached by a group of girls who wanted to be a part of a school dance team. There wasn’t one at their school and they needed someone to teach it, sponsor them, choreograph, etc. She did and the kids were grateful and it grew and did well. Then those kids aged out and the next group were forced into it by their parents so they’d have an extra-curricular activity. The new batch didn’t want to do it and were pains in the ass and made teaching the whole thing a chore. So she told the principal she was done teaching that group at the end of the year and the program was shut down. She figures in five years another group will want to do it again.

ETA: What would you do if 20 years from now you get a message from a kid you had taught with a photo of them at their desk at SpaceX/NASA//Blue Origins and a note that says “thanks for teaching me rockets, SteveA!”
 
The two clubs I launch with are predominately males over the age of 50. All of the launches I've been to over the last 5 years had, at most, 1 or 2 people under the age of 20 actively participating.

I have noticed groups of college students at quite a few launches. It's usually a group of 8 to 10 students, a mentor and a rocket that is barely flight worthy. I see more failures during these flights than anything. I don't anticipate any of these students continuing with rocketry after college.

Unfortunately I see this hobby becoming esoteric once the baby boomers and early gen-x'ers are gone.
Rocketry ain't cheap.

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Rocketry ain't cheap.

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That depends what kind of rocketry we are talking about. If you stay out if HPR, rocketry is downright budget-oriented activity!

Of all the hobbies my kids have, rocketry produces the lightest hit to the wallet:
- swimming (you would be shocked if you knew!)
- skiing
- scuba
- car racing
- Lego kits (programmable and not)
- most sports, all of which require ridiculous amount of equipment that piles up around the house...

... all cost way more than rocketry!

The ONLY difference between rocketry and other kids activities is that the former requires active parental participation. That could be a bridge too far for some (vs. "cut the check and drop them off" activities).


YMMV,
a

P.S.: Me, and my HPR follies, do cost a tad more, but still a fraction of our swimming budget!

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Yeah, I gotta say that while like all hobbies there's the potential to go totally insane if you're not disciplined you can do an awful lot with a reasonable outlay.

Choir for the kids (two in my case) is I think $1500 each plus now my daughter's old enough to do choir camp and I think that's another $1500. So $4500/year just for the kids to sing, which they could of course do for free.

Club has monthly launches 6ish times a year, depending on weather, buy a new Estes kit every launch if they're good, let them shoot off a few motors, club membership is $25/year, spend most of the time watching the other people launch the big ones. It's manageable.
 
It really does depend on your level of involvement. When I joined LUNAR 9 years ago, I was content to launch my LPRs, and watch others launch their MPRs and HPRs. But then I got the first itch, bought some reload hardware, and started building and flying my own MPRs. Then I got the next itch, and got my L1. The last itch was my L2. But if you fly a limited amount of rockets like I do, it's really not that expensive compared to some other hobbies.
 
ETA: What would you do if 20 years from now you get a message from a kid you had taught with a photo of them at their desk at SpaceX/NASA//Blue Origins and a note that says “thanks for teaching me rockets, SteveA!”

On the bright side, one of my "Alums" is currently working on his degree in aerospace engineering. Yeah,it was the rockets that hooked him. I hope I do get that note 20 years from now. That would be awesome. Two in one lifetime? How cool would that be?
 
Out here in San Diego we're seeing steadily increasing participation at DART launches. More Scout groups, more family fliers (30-something parents with kids), and plenty of TARC teams. We are also starting to get schools doing non-TARC STEM rocketry programs. I don't know if the Falcon Heavy itself is a huge driver, but the Mars objective, asteroid defense etc. seems to have people more interested in space lately. Robotics, rocketry and Science Olympiad are all going strong in education here.
 
Interesting that you see a lot of failures from the college crowd. ...

We see a fair amount of failures from the college students too. Remember, they are working on a team project and most of the people on the team are not working on the rocket. The rocket is only there to get the payload up in the air. Some people developed the payload (often a rover or some other autonomous hardware item), some are software people writing code to control the rover, etc. You may only have 1 or 2 people on the team who built the rocket and really knows how it works.

And it isn't until they see a big rocket launched for the first time that they appreciate the power and forces involved. The guy who built the rocket for the team may have launched an Estes rocket or two years ago, but often that is the extent of their experience. Jumping from low power to L1 and then L2 high power is a huge leap; and techniques for building a low power rocket do not scale well for an L1 rocket.

That is not to say that all college teams are like that. We had one team recently where all 8 team members built their own L1 certification rocket and launched it successfully. The college bought a bunch of body tubes, motor mounts, nose cones, etc. and they all were required to build and earn their L1 certificate. They also had free motors.

And my club attends a lot of STEM activities in the area. The people we get at our booth are mostly middle aged white guys who flew rockets as a kid. We do get some kids, but you need to hook mom or dad and or nothing will happen.
 
...
And it isn't until they see a big rocket launched for the first time that they appreciate the power and forces involved. The guy who built the rocket for the team may have launched an Estes rocket or two years ago, but often that is the extent of their experience. Jumping from low power to L1 and then L2 high power is a huge leap; and techniques for building a low power rocket do not scale well for an L1 rocket.
...

One of my kids who's involved in a big rocketry project in college said that most of the people on the team have no experience with rocketry beyond LPR. They are now scratch building an O hybrid rocket and motor to go to 30,000 feet. They have had a lot of recovery challenges over the last few years.
 
Failure is okay as long as you learn from it.

https://www.inverse.com/article/38615-elon-musk-biggest-failures

From the article:

​[FONT=&amp]“There’s a silly notion that failure’s not an option at [/FONT]NASA[FONT=&amp],” [/FONT]Musk said[FONT=&amp] in a 2015 interview about SpaceX. “Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”[/FONT][FONT=&amp]There’s room to quibble with some of the details of that sentiment — the line “Failure is not an option” was meant to encapsulate the indomitable spirit that saw NASA bring the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth after disaster struck, after all — but Musk’s career serves as ample proof that the first step to success is a whole bunch of failure.
Consider, for example, when SpaceX spent 16 months trying to prove it was possible to land one of its rockets on its oceangoing recovery droneships. The first attempt took place on January 10, 2015. It was decently successful, actually, as the company demonstrated the levels of precision control it would need to get the rocket to within mere yards of landing on the ship. The key phrase there is “within mere yards.”
[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]It wasn’t until April 8, 2016, that the company managed the first of three consecutive successful landings on the droneship. The try in June for four in a row ended with the rocket in flames, but SpaceX engineer Kate Tice might as well have been been speaking for Musk when she offered this take on the failure: “Important thing to keep in mind is that we did receive a lot of really good data from this. As always, these are experimental attempts, and, although we can say that Falcon 9 was lost in this attempt, we did get a lot of really valuable data from it.”

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]
[/FONT]
 
Most people I know who are aware the hobby even exists learned about it via Scouts or a summer camp... The renewed interest in space exploration will most certainly help get and keep kids interested but the hobby still needs to be actively promoted.

I honestly had no idea anything bigger than a D12 could even be purchased by mere mortals until last year. I was a NAR member in the 80s and at some point a very large collection of 1980s Estes models of mine (including a few gems I really really wish I still had) got tossed or sold because I was now an “Adult”. Took another 15 years (and having kids of my own) to realize being an Adult all the time isn’t much fun. I joined my local club so I’d have a place to legally launch a couple of my “bigger” rockets with my boy. Once I saw all these guys gleefully burning their wives money sending up G powered machines I was completely hooked.


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One of my kids who's involved in a big rocketry project in college said that most of the people on the team have no experience with rocketry beyond LPR. They are now scratch building an O hybrid rocket and motor to go to 30,000 feet. They have had a lot of recovery challenges over the last few years.

High power rocketry is a real eye opener for these students. I am sure they are very book smart, but some of the things they have done are very naïve. What looks good on paper doesn't necessarily work well in the field. G forces and aerodynamic stresses are just numbers on paper until you see what they can do to a rocket that is poorly designed. We've seen 9V batteries taped to av bay sleds, or rather, we have seen what happens when you think tape will hold a 9V battery to an av bay sled during a high power launch.
 
Rocket money is interesting seeing how it's really subjective and relative. It can be very affordable if your projects are kept reasonable. You can fly several flights a month on a 29mm powered HP kit for as cheap as $20ish per flight. Or you can fly 54mm power once for the same amount of money as you would spend on multiple small flights and have spare time to sit back and enjoy other's fly.
 
Definitely not many kids my age in rocketry. I'm an 18 year old senior in high school and am one of the only kids at the rocket launches I have gone to. I have tried to convince some of my friends who are interested in engineering and science like me to build some rockets, but they just don't want to spend the money. However, out of all of my extracurricular activities it is probably one of the cheapest and looked great on my applications to engineering schools.


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Interesting. I am keenly interested in the amount of activity in the San Diego area. If it is being driven by the recent Space X activity and Mars, then it will be awhile before such interests gain traction here in the outback of Kansas. Great discussion.
Thanks, guys!
 
We had another launch today in San Diego. There were six new families.

One is a work friend who wanted to see what the launches were about. He brought his 2 daughters. They came "just to watch." They left after buying RTF rockets from the onsite vendor and launching several times.

The other four I asked how they found us. They said they knew they wanted to launch, wanted to be responsible and legal so they did a search and found us on the internet. So I asked why they chose rockets specifically. Here's what they said:

One had a few kids, one of whom (about 8 years old) got a rocket for his birthday because he wanted one. I asked why he specifically chose a rocket as a gift and he just shrugged and said rockets are cool. I couldn't argue.

One father had done it when he was young and brought his two kids with a couple brand new Alphas.

Another had done it when he was young and brought his three kids and two neighbor kids. He specifically said he was working to find hands-on activities to get the kids some time away from electronics. He also specifically said he brought all the kids together to show them the Falcon Heavy launch the day it happened, and showed them again first thing this morning to get them excited about the model rocket launch.

Another father who'd done it when he was a kid brought his family and a box of rockets from his attic. They had an SR-71 and an FDNY tribute rocket, along with the good Estes igniters with pyro on the tips. He said he hadn't launched for years and years.

Another new family showed up at the very end with a couple adorable little girls. They had time to launch twice each. I didn't get a chance to ask them what got them into it.

I get the feeling what's happening is the recent professional rocketry stuff (SpaceX, Blue Origins, etc.) is igniting the old spark in the back of the brains of people who did this as kids and we're getting BARs who are bringing their kids. I wish I could say it's my rugged good looks and charm that's dragging people in from places far and wide. But people are getting drawn to rocketry for other reasons and getting pushed to our club to make the launches legal and whatnot.
 
I went for a couple hours to the san diego launch with my family, it was a great time and turnout! We had a blast and my 8 year old had a melted chute catastrophe with his crossfire that broke 2 of the fins but the onsite vendor gave us great price on a replacement rocket and a bulk pack of motors.


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The engineering students at UTC involved in rocket projects all want L-1/L-2 cert now after they've finished their projects. They said it was cool. Most of these guys never flew an Estes nor knew the hobby existed. I'm trying a certification again in a few weeks.

On the university level, SEDS, IREC, and SLI are applied HPR competitions for undergrad. Research wise it's always fuels or motor multi cycle processes at grad level. Some aero but usually it's mainly more NACA info based and not new stuff.
 
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