Mdutch
Well-Known Member
IIRC the old traditional LDRS had separate Research and Commercial Launch Days. You could not launch commercial on Research days and NAR members could only launch on commercial days. On launches that went from Thursday thru Tuesday, the first 2 and the last 2 days were research and the weekend was commercial. Now that you can launch commercial and research on the same day at the same location, you can have less than 6 days, however not everyone can take all those days off to launch rockets. A lot of folks will travel on Thursday and leave Sunday, some will travel on Friday or Saturday and leave on Sunday or Monday so you have to accommodate them.
Bob
FWIW: When LDRS 23 was held in Geneseo the research rules were such that on the research days you could ONLY fly research motors, commercial motors were not allowed, so the research and commercial days had to be separate. Jump forward to LDRS 28, when Bob Utley, Neil Mcgilvray, Debra Koloms and myself were Co-Launch Directors, research days still had to be separate from Commercial days but TRA Members could now fly any research OR commercial motors up to your cert level on research days. Oh yes and we had finally just WON our decade old federal lawsuit against the ATF and they were forced to remove AP propellant from their explosive list. Now move forward to LDRS 31 when I was the Launch Director and Al Gloer was the Co-Launch Director. The research days and commercial days were still separate but only because we were still having to allow for NAR only participants to be able to come and fly at an LDRS. Then we do a quick jump to a couple months later and the Tripoli BOD ruled to allow NAR only flyers the ability to fly on research days as long as they followed the NAR safety rules while flying on research days. So this lead to many Prefectures opting to have only research days on their calendars since there was no longer any need to have commercial days to accommodate the NAR only flyers to come fly with our Tripoli prefectures. This is why URRF 1 and URRF 2 were flown as Tripoli research launches and why both launches under Bill Clune's leadership as a Launch Director were and will continue to be popular. Just as LDRS 34 will be very well run by Bill too.
We should ALL note that these advancements to our hobby have been achieved by the leadership of our Tripoli BOD, and I'm sure things like this will continue to be accomplished by them.
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