Our event for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is coming up on Saturday, July 20th. We will be running a "fly it - take it" event on the archery field adjacent to the St. Louis Science Center's McDonnell Planetarium, in conjunction with the other festivities SLSC is hosting. We will have 72 built model rockets ready to put in the hands of visitors as they take part in a combined spot-landing / precision duration competition - the spot-landing target being, of course, the moon! The first place winner of this competition will take home a trophy that includes an actual space-flown piece of foil from the Apollo 11 spacecraft, generously donated by Earl Mullins of the Space Museum in Bonne Terre, MO. If you've been around the club long enough to remember the 45th anniversary event we did in 2014 with Gene Kranz, you may recall that Mr. Mullins donated a similar piece of Apollo 11 space-flown foil as a grand prize then as well.

To make this event a success, we are looking for volunteers willing to help out on the day of the event. Setup will begin at 8:00am, the competition event will run from 9:30am to 2:00pm, and we should be cleaned up and done by 3:00 or 3:30pm. We will need volunteers of all levels of rocketry experience to help with registering visitors for the contest, timing and scoring the rocket flights, and talking to the public about hobby rocketry and our club.

As an incentive, SLRA club president David Kovar is making a generous donation of his own - an Estes Saturn V flying model rocket kit (1:100 scale) to be raffled off among our volunteers! SLRA would like to thank St. Louis Science Center for donating the rocket kits and motors for the competition, Mr. Mullins for donating the Apollo 11 foil for the grand prize, and Dave for donating the prize for the volunteer raffle.

If you would like to volunteer, please email John Buckley at jbuckley1996@gmail.com.

Although Buder Park has reopened, it is still too wet (with standing water on large portions of the field) for us to have a launch there this weekend. In order to allow competition flyers an opportunity to get a last round of flights in before NARAM, we have arranged to use the field adjacent to Bonne Terre Airport. The street address is:

7444 Williams Rd
Bonne Terre, MO  63628

The club's launch equipment will be available for sport launches, and John Buckley will act as the contest director for competition launches as usual. Range setup will begin at 8:00am and we have access to the field until 2:00pm.

If you have any questions, please email John Buckley or David Kovar.

Thank you to everyone who has sent us photos of Buder Park. As of yesterday, the park was still partially flooded and the road was not open all the way around. (David Pape's photo attached below - this is taken from near the entrance looking towards the GSLMA pavilion.) According to John Buckley, who was there yesterday, there were still large puddles everywhere and you would need boots to walk around. He does not plan to try to do NRC launches this weekend.

We will take another look next week, but it would need to dry out a lot in order for us to have our regularly scheduled club launch next weekend. I will send out another announcement late next week once we've made that final decision. Again, thanks to everyone who wrote in!

This month's meeting announcement is going out a bit earlier than usual since I have a couple of additional items to go with it. The meeting details are below.

A) We have a model rocket launch scheduled for Sunday, June 30th at Buder Park, which was flooded until (very) recently. The St. Louis County Parks & Recreation page no longer lists Buder as closed (hooray!). My first request for assistance is to anyone who lives or works near Buder and has a free moment to please stop by between now and then and confirm that the park is really open, and see what the condition of the field is. In particular, we'll need to know how much standing water is left behind (the corners of the field can be ponds for a few weeks after a flood) and how muddy everything is (particularly the southeast area where our new concrete pad and sign are). Please email admin@stlouisrocketry.com if you have a chance to reconnoiter for us. Of course, do not enter the park if it is closed, and do not put yourself at risk with respect to flood waters.

B) We have an upcoming July 20th event for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, in cooperation with the St. Louis Science Center. SLSC is purchasing 72 Estes E2X rocket kits for us to give away to kids to allow them to participate in a spot-landing contest, but we (club members) will be assembling those kits ahead of time. We had discussed using the June club meeting as a build session, but it looks as if the kits won't arrive in time for us to do that. We'll be looking for volunteers to either attend another build session in early July, or to pick up some kits from Dave Kovar to assemble at home and bring to the July 20th event. Details of this will be worked out at the meeting.

Thanks for reading this far! We now return you to our regularly scheduled meeting announcement:

SLRA is having our regular monthly meeting on Tuesday evening, June 25th, at our regular meeting location:

Fallon's Bar & Grill 9200 Olive Blvd. #116 Olivette, Missouri, 63132

The room will be available at 6:00 PM and the business meeting will start at about 7:00PM.

If you're a member of SLRA and are registered on the website, you can view minutes of previous meetings here: Meeting Minutes Page, The meeting minutes will be the basis of our "old business" discussion.

The standard agenda for all meetings is as follows:

1. Treasury Status.
2. Recognition of Achievements
3. Recognition of Contributions
4. Members expenses.
5. Old Business - please review minutes for last month's meeting for topics
6. New Business

Online and paper membership forms with payments received by mail to be processed by treasurer and president.

Please email admin@stlouisrocketry.com if you have new business for the meeting.

The image says it all. Our field is underwater and it will only get deeper between now and our launch date. We'll try again on our next scheduled event, Sunday June 30.