HARA’s Open House Event last Thursday was a wild success.  First of all, thank you to all those who helped put the evening on, especially Fred Kepner Woody Bevill, and Laura Schertz. I spent the days leading up to the event at NASA Wallops and relied heavily on the team back home to take care of the last minute details. After problems with the email server and being bumped from the conference hall to the classroom by the Alabama Fashion Week party, we had some doubts that many people would come. Boy were we wrong. .

The room was covered in rockets and visitors. A good deal of them heard about the open house from our PSA on 89.3 WLRH (Thank you Omar Mireles and Brett Tannehill). Over 50 people signed the log.  With all the people coming and going all night, I estimate that about 70 people came out. All the food was gone in the first half hour, and we sent out for some pizzas. Check out this video time lapse.

So, going around the room.  All of our visitors were greeted by a few club members loitering by the door. Elliot Laramie had an impressive collection of mid power kits including his new AGM-78. Just passed him, Fred had an HPR collection. His imposing L3 rocket stretched across the floor. The food and drink table was picked over quickly. Young rocketeer Tyler and his father had a great LPR collect, and their new Saturn V rocket was impressively detailed and is ready to fly on March 15th. Just passed that was UAH’s Charger Rocket Works team displaying several years of their NASA USLI rockets. Vince Hugele and Bill Cooke both had an impressive LPR collection. Duane Mayer and some volunteers set up a display for the upcoming SOAR program including the first parts built for the SOAR rocket. Thank you very much for championing that for us.

At the Center of the Room, the NASA nano launcher team set up a display of the full scale 3rd and 4th stage of their 3U cubesat launch vehicle, and their HPR roll control system payload that will fly in the weeks to come.

On the other side of the isle, I set up my scale Pegasus rocket, the Launch Abort System (LAS), and a two part reverse mold of the Air Force’s X-37 space plane. There were lots of other rockets there, and I’m sorry if I missed you. Please tell us what you brought in the comments.

Just recently at NARCON, NAR members were discussing ideas about how to grow rocket clubs. Vince mentioned our Open House. No one to our knowledge has done that before, and they are interested to hear how we did it and what the effect was.  The effect was better than expected, and it wasn’t that hard to do in retrospect.  I see HARA making this an annual event to kick off the flying season.