What Is TARC?

The American Rocketry Challenge (TARC) is the largest STEM competition in the nation, encompassing over 600 teams each year from all over the country.  Teams who are sponsored by a middle/high school or youth organization are able to participate in the infamous egg lift engineering challenge.  Each year, the challenge has been some advanced variation of taking an egg up to a certain altitude and returning it safely to the ground.  Teams will fly locally for their qualification flights.  For these flights, the goal is to get the lowest score possible with every foot that the rocket deviates from the target altitude adding 1 point and every seconds outside of the time window adding 4 points.  The 100 teams from across the nation that have the lowest scores from the qualifying round are then invited to launch at the National Finals where the objective is the same but the attitude and time windows change from what they were during the qualifying round.  The National Finals are held in The Plains, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C..

Our team has competed in The American rocketry Challenge for 4 seasons now, qualifying for the National Finals 3 of those times.  Each year, we are excited to see students new to rocketry develop their passion and skill set, and achieve great milestones, in addition to putting up a great competition against some of the best teams in the world.  Our best performance was ranking 2nd in California and 6th in the United States (2021).  

Now, our new team looks to compete in the 2025 edition of the competition, making this our fifth year competing.  This year's challenge is a two diameter, rocket, carrying to eggs on their side, with a target altitude of 790 feet and a time window of 41 to 44 seconds.  Best of luck to the team!!