Quest at NCASE 2008

This is the brawn side of the “A-team” from Quest. The A-team is what Bill called us when he asked if we could/would cover the NCASE show for him. (It couldn’t be that he just wanted to be in Chicago himself getting his latest award and needed somebody else to go to DC.) Anyway Suzy Sprague and her brawny husband (me, Jack) have been friends with Nettie, Scott and Bill for ‘a-long-time-now’ and are enthusiastic about the sport and hobby of model rocketry. Suzy speaks both rocketry and teacher, and is thus the perfect person to represent Quest at the National Convention of Air and Space Educators in our nation’s capitol. And me, I talk rockets with anybody that will listen, and I can set up the display booth and move boxes. We make a great Quest A-team.


Our Quest display booth

NCASE was held at the Crystal Gateway Marriott just across the Potomac from the national mall area of the District of Columbia. This year there were about 450 educators attending from across the country and another 120 or so representatives of the Civil Air Patrol. Even though Quest has been at this convention several times in the past, most of the comments we got started with some variation of ‘I did not know that Quest did model rockets.’ But we could eventually turn each conversation into ‘How can Quest help you teach aerospace?’ Some of the highlights of the show from our perspective make some of these points pretty well.

The CAP has a new rocketry and space study program. They offer three levels of study involving different types of rockets and increasing knowledge and skills of the cadet. The three CAP levels are named after three increasingly powerful American rocket boosters; Redstone, Titan and Saturn. Quest has support for both the water rockets and model rockets used in this new study guide. And at the Saturn Level, the Quest models of the Tomahawk, X-15 and Terrier-Orion satisfy both the flight, and scale elements for the cadet.

The Quest X - 15 Sally and her Dad, Scott

Speaking of the X-15, one of the most famous X-15 pilots was Scott Crossfield. His daughter was at NCASE and really liked our X-15 on display. Sally Crossfield Farley is running a scholarship foundation in her Dad’s name, and was very interested in anything that could bring students into aerospace; like flying a model of her father’s rocket-plane. Sally left before we could donate the display to her, so I still owe an X-15 kit to the Crossfield Foundation.

And two other Quest features that can help bring aerospace effectively to the classroom are our beginning level kits, and our educator bulk-packs. The entry kits quickly caught the attention of elementary educators. Either the ‘almost-ready-to-fly’ Starhawk with its one-piece plastic fin-can, or the new Astra with its novel ‘through-the-wall’ fin attachment tabs are frequently seen as superior fits for the first-time builder, and for first-time teachers too.

One other group that was at NCASE helping catch student’s attention and bring them into careers in aerospace was the Team America Rocket Challenge. This group, sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and by the National Association of Rocketry holds the worlds largest model rocket contest each year. The task varies each year but usually involves flying a raw egg to an exact altitude. This year’s challenge task could be handled by a modified Quest Courier egg-lifter. And our payload rockets can give beginners experience in flying the altimeter used by TARC. Several Texas High Schools use the Courier and the Zenith to introduce their TARC teams to the building and flying skills required for this contest. Trip Barber, the President of the NAR and one of the founders of the TARC contest liked our characterization of the Quest line as training wheels for TARC teams.

Suzy and I got packed up and back home safely, and are just now getting the contact names from the show back to Quest Headquarters. We are hoping that getting the Quest brand and products out in the open will better help our educators boost the interest and activity levels of hobby rocket around the country.

Fly ‘em Safe! --Jack