OLYMPIA

AEROSPACE

CLUB

Sponsored by the Olympic Flight Museum

We are a team of 6th to 12th grade students from Olympia, Washington, who are interested in aerospace. Our mission is to empower and inspire students to pursue a career in STEM, through designing, building, and flying high-performing model rockets, inviting guest speakers from NASA and the University of Washington, and competing in The American Rocketry Challenge (the largest model rocketry competition in the world). Our club is often the first place many students experience rocketry and the fundamentals of aerospace engineering in school.

Sponsors:

Additional thank you to the Puget Sound Silent Flyers for proving a launch field and supporting our mission!

$27K

Funds Raised

13

Total TARC Teams

18th

2025 national rank out of over 1,000 teams

80+

Total Launches

It's not rocket science... except it is

With the Aerospace Club, rocket science doesn’t have to be hard. It can be a fun, exciting, and educational experience. Sure, there are challenges, but nothing a team of bright students can’t solve! Even though our students aren’t sending missions to the moon (yet), our model rockets teach students all the fundamentals that real aerospace engineers use on a daily basis, such as aerodynamics, structures, propulsion, simulation, mathematics, and more.

The Competitive Team

Our club revolves around competing in The American Rocketry Challenge (TARC), which is an annual competition in the United States that engages students in the exciting field of aerospace engineering and rocketry. Students design, build, test, and redesign a model rocket to meet predefined altitude, timing, and other requirements, all while returning an egg safely to Earth!

2026 ARC Engineering Specifications ⚙️🚀

Source: https://rocketrychallenge.org/wp-content/uploads/ARC-Rules-2026-FINAL.pdf

Total Flight Time: 36 to 39 seconds

Payload: Raw egg, 55-63 grams in mass, up to 45 millimeters in diameter
Target Apogee: 229 meters
Minimum Rocket Length: 650 millimeters
Minimum Rocket Diameter: 47 millimeters
Maximum Rocket Gross Takeoff Weight: 650 grams
Maximum Impulse: 80 Newton-seconds

The Recreational Team*

We recognize that not everybody is ready to commit to an intensive rocket competition and simply desire to “get a feel” for rocketry and aerospace as a whole.

Thus, the remainder of our members compose the Recreational team, where students watch launches and come and go every week to build model rocket kits for the sake of enjoyment and exposure. All for free, of course!

*Not offered in the 2025-2026 school year

Above: Photos from a recreational team build session on November 15th, 2024.

"These students have such an impressive array of skills and truly interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving that it goes well beyond the principles of aerospace engineering" -Dan Needlands, Puget Sound Silent Flyers President

LP Brown Elementary School Outreach

We have also been invited to host a rocketry event at LP Brown Elementary School, in which we taught students how to build paper stomp rockets and demonstrated one of our larger rockets! We hope this event will inspire these students to continue exploring aerospace as they move into middle and high school!