Rocket Challenge comments

In all fairness, one democrat senator did support the bill. My senator, Dick Durbin. Must have been the conversation he had with John Kallend that swayed him.

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

Ashcroft, for lack of a more descriptive word, is evil.

Chuck Rudy

VooDoo Digital Productions

I suspect that if Enzi had been in the Democratic Party, there would have been just as much Republican opposition - same sort of thing: congresscritters who thought they saw an easy chance to bitch at The Other Party...

-dave w

On 9 Nov 2003 18:36:29 -0800, snipped-for-privacy@acceptable-gains.net (Ismaeel Abdur-Rasheed) is alleged to have written:

True.... But, in context, it's not that bad of a mistake.

There are actually two issues here -- Tripoli being called *the* governing body, and our hobby being called "amateur rocketry".

For the first, it's a simple mistake of using the definite rather than the indefinite article. Tripoli is, without question, *a* governing body in the hobby. Considering that the filming was done at Tripoli's "big yearly event", that mistake is quite understandable. If the filming had been done at NARAM or NSL, then NAR might have been called "the" governing body.... For LDRS, calling Tripoli *the* governing body is pretty much true.

The second "mistake" is one of perception, and one of choosing your definitions.

Many in the rocketry hobby like to label "making your own motors" as "amateur rocketry", and call other hobby rocketry activities "model rocketry" or "high power rocketry", depending on scale.

Personally, I tend to oppose this definition, because, to those who aren't part of the hobby, there are really only two divisions: Professional Rocketry (as conducted by the likes of Boeing, LockMart, NASA, and other big companies and quangos), and Amateur Rocketry, which is rocketry activities conducted by amateurs, instead of by companies who make their living doing it. Details like who makes the motor and who makes the airframe are interesting to people doing it, but irrellevant to the world at large.

Promoting "Amateur Rocketry" as a concept can only be a good thing -- in its very name, it carries the germ of the idea that anyone can be a rocket scientist, and fly rockets. Getting people to see the possible is the name of the game. Right now, hobby rocketry "flies under the radar"; people don't even know it exists, much less know that it's possible for them to participate. If we can get just the two words "amateur rocketry" out there, and get people to just think about those two words, we're going to get a lot of people excited, and bring some new blood into the hobby, just by making people realize that rocketry is not the exclusive provenance of defense contractors and NASA.

- Rick "Amateur" Dickinson

This show showed mixing of propellants. THAT is indeed amateur rocketry. It is NOT HPR. TRA is a HPR organization, so that was disingenuous. And if it is no longer a HPR organization, but an amateur organization then it should say so and stop the madness. The two are legally and procedurally incompatible.

Yep.