650 grams, 42 events, no AI.

A rocket payload weighing less than a paperback, and the Technology Student Association's 42-event catalogue. Both ask the same thing: build the thing, document the build, and demonstrate it on the day.

2 competitions 1 archived 1 in audit

In This Department

Two builders.

Audit

Aerospace · Build & Launch

American Rocketry Challenge

Altitude 750 ft · Duration 36–39 sec · Egg payload.

Max weight 650g · min length 650mm · max impulse 80 N-sec. Top 100 qualify for the National Fly-Off in Virginia each May; top 10 share $100K in scholarships.

NAR · May Fly-Off →

Technology Student Association

Six events per participant; GenAI explicitly banned.

All 41 high-school event descriptions captured across 8 clusters. Both PDFs re-validated. Forty canonical events documented in the stub playbook.

TSA · National Conf June →

An editor's note

Read the rules before you cut the airframe.

The American Rocketry Challenge is the most specification-driven competition in this library. Four hard numbers — altitude, duration, weight, length — plus the egg payload define what success looks like. Most teams that miss the cutoff miss it on one of those four.

TSA is the opposite: 42 events across eight clusters, each with its own rubric. Six events per participant; AI strictly prohibited (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot named explicitly). The breadth is part of the point — TSA is built so a school's whole technology programme can compete together.

A note on the rocketry blocker

The official rocketrychallenge.org site currently returns HTTP 403 to automated fetchers. Our intelligence is sourced from the NAR partner site, which mirrors the 2026 specifications. We're tracking the block as a known boundary.

— The Editors