April - Almost Ready and In The News

There is still a lot of work to do and we leave in a week and a half.  What do we have left to do?

• Build our back up rockets - Done!
• Test those rockets - Done!
• Ship motors (must go ground due to materials) - Done!
• Ship rockets and other stuff we will need while there - Done!
• Get our t-shirts printed - Peter designed a fun logo for the shirts we will wear while there. Done!

What else is going on?  We got our presentation ready for the Presentation Competition while at nationals.  We send that in today and then they will pick the top 15 submissions.  If we are chosen we will get to do our presentation at the fly-offs.  There is prize money for the best presentation.  There is also a best dressed and a rocket building competition.

Update:  We were selected for the presentation competition!  We are practicing for that before we leave too. 

The news report that Emily Younger came out to film us for aired on Saturday night. Here is a link to that:

http://krqe.com/2015/04/25/local-students-compete-for-national-rocketry-title/

And as always we are going to raise money until the last minute so if you are so inclined:  http://www.gofundme.com/teamsigma

Interviews and more launching.

We are in the recent addition of the Rio Rancho Observer.  That was exciting.  This caused a couple of TV news stations to contact us for an interview.

This morning we had a planned practice launch so Channel 13 news reporter, Emily Younger, came out to watch the launch and ask us some questions.  She was really awesome and asked a lot of great questions about the team and rocketry.  She will let us know when the story will air.  

Here is the awesome launch pad Peter made. He and Jeremy are percussionists in band so Peter used a cymbal as the base and it sits on a camera tripod.  We were hoping the blast off would be musical but that didn't happen.  The cymbal also deflects the flame from the ignition so it keeps everything safe too.  

One of our launches from today.

And don't forget to share our fundraising link if you get a chance: http://www.gofundme.com/teamsigma

April - Alright! Let's get to Nationals!

So we made it to nationals.  Now what?  Well first more fundraising. Here we were at the Sandia National Laboratories Federal Credit Union on another Saturday.  We did well, but not quite enough to get to nationals.

So this morning we set up a Go Fund Me account.  If you are so inclined, please donate to our traveling fund:

http://www.gofundme.com/teamsigma

Please note, donations made to our GoFundMe account are not tax-deductible as they are considered a gift.  If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to our team please make a check payable to Albuquerque ACTSO with Team Sigma Rocketry in the memo line and mail to the following address:

ACTSO
c/o NAACP
PO Box 1922
Albuquerque, NM 87103-1922


Thank you.

Also, we have a very long checklist of things we need to do to get ready.  We need to build another rocket, do test launches with that rocket, get everything ready to go, get our school work in ahead of time since we will miss some school, but it is educational so that is OK right?  I'm pretty sure we'll still have homework, but we can do that on the plane.

April - Top 100 Teams Announced!

April 3rd is when the Top 100 Teams who will be invited to the national fly-offs will be announced.  So we were basically refreshing the TARC page and I think the rest of the teams were as well, because their site kind of went down.  Ooops.

Friday, April 3rd 1:58pm we learned the team...

MADE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

We and two other teams from New Mexico are going to The Plains, Virginia to compete nationally!  Unfortunately, Team Delta (the other team ACT-SO is mentoring) did not qualify.  They quickly sent out their congratulations to us.

Who knew three kids who never worked with rockets before and are pretty young would get to compete their first year out.

Here we are toasting with apple cider to making it to nationals! We didn't get a chance to toast until April 18th, but we are posting it here because April 3rd is when we found out.