Meatball Rocketry Home

Welcome to Meatball Rocketry! These are the personal rocketry pages of the Tschirhart family. Navigate the site by the links above. I have posted scale data, photos, and construction tips in the Articles & Data page. And be sure to check out the Links page for other scale data and photo sources, as well as links to informational and vendor sites! For non-rocketry stuff be sure to visit the Family Page.

Happy modeling and flying!

Above: Josh & Jess with Saturn V
(Eric Fadely photo)

HOW WE GOT STARTED IN MODEL ROCKETRY...

I (Josh) first got interested in model rockets when I was only four. My dad built a three-stage Estes Astron Farside and flew it at a local school in Saginaw, Michigan. The first Space Shuttle launch was also that year, and that's how I really got hooked. For most of my childhood I wanted to be an astronaut.

I was in and out of rocketry growing up, but I managed to find an out-of-production Astron Farside kit at a small hobby shop, and it once again sparked my interest. I joined the National Association of Rocketry (NAR) in 1988 and met international Scale Spacemodeler Bob Biedron just after starting high school in 1990. He graciously let me visit his workshop on several occasions, and showed me many of his modeling techniques. That same year I discovered NAR competition, and attended my first sport launches with the Vikings NAR section in Richmond, Virginia.

For most of high school I did not do any rocket building or flying. A year after graduation I was involved in a kids' Vacation Bible School (1995) that had a space theme--I knew that we needed a rocket to launch for the kids, so I bought an Astrocam. No success with the photos, but later that summer, my friend Jeff and I launched the "Addicted 2 Jesus" rocket, named after a line from a certain Christian song (kinda cheesy, I know, but it is a very cool rocket--see link below).

A few years later I began playing drums at church. Jessica and I started hanging out and finally married in 2000, but I was too busy tinkering with electronic drums to think about rockets. We eventually visited a sport launch hosted by a local club, SEVRA, and we started flying nearly every month. With little Ben and Jane now in tow, it is a little more difficult to go to as many launches as we would like, but we still manage to go to a launch here or there--usually with the Vikings Rocket Society, now that the club has been resurrected.

Since the spring of 2002, Jess and I both have entered models in NAR Sport Scale competition either individually or as a team. In 2005 we flew with NARHAMS member Kevin Johnson as the Meatball Rocketry Team. The year's competition culminated at the national meet (NARAM-47) this year in Ohio, where we placed 1st in Giant Sport Scale, 3rd in Research & Development, and tied for 3rd place in Set Duration (Kevin flew this event).


Left: Jessica and I with our first competition models Middle: Me with the Commanche 3 and my brother Aaron with the Der V-3 Right: Josh and Ben with the Black Brant XII at NARAM-47 (Kevin Johnson photo)