By Vince Huegele
The thing people did at NARCON that was the most fun was not attending the technical sessions, listening to astronauts, visiting with old rocket friends or even touring the historic launch pads. People got the biggest grin from reading the severe winter weather reports from their hometowns while sitting in the 70 degree Florida sun.
Folks attending from Ohio, Michigan and Illinois boasted about the low temps and deep snow they were missing, but the crew from Minnesota won. The Cocoa Beach location attracted a lot of national visitors to NAR’s annual convention. http://www.milasolutions.com/
I got in town early to meet with the Board of Trustees where we spent a 12 hour day grinding out the business of running the organization. NAR is in great shape and continues to offer wonderful and unique service to the rocketry community. Then it was on to a reception to kick off the weekend at the Air Force Space and Missile Center, a small volunteer run museum different from the massive KSC visitor center. There are some cool exhibits there including a display of model rocketry.
Saturday was full of presentations of rocket history, current missions, technical developments, student experiments and construction tips. There was a vendor room with many tempting products. For lunch we got to hear a panel of retired engineers tell stories about the glory days of the space program and the excitement of launching the early Atlas rockets (which often failed and drove the safe viewing distances back further and further.) The dinner banquet had a forum of two astronaut speakers led by the director of KSC. They said the movie “Gravity” was not even close to what it’s really like being up there.
NARCON 2014 was very well organized and ran smoothly. I reunited with many of my counterparts in NAR and other familiar faces like Vern and Gleda. A pilgrimage to Canaveral is always impressive and inspiring, but it’s even more so with rocket friends.
