Sound-bites: Catherine Votovich, team captain Dr. Jacob Hudson, faculty advisor Damien Memorial School took its one best shot on Sunday at qualifying for the National Association of Rocketry’s national championships, getting off four launches at Marine Cope Base Hawaii. Damien is one of only two Hawaii school teams to ever qualify for the prestigious Team America Rocketry Challenge in Virginia and the only one to place in the top 20 there. That was in 2014. This year it is the only Hawaii team in contention for a national berth. While most American schools get dozens of chances to launch, Damien is severely limited due to Oahu’s tight air space. Dr Jacob Hudson, the team’s faculty advisor, relies on the Marine base to let him know when there is a Sunday without flight operations. Damien's only previous outing to the Marine base this year was for trial launches to work out kinks. Sunday’s first launch of a 75-centimeter tall Estes rocket with a payload of one egg was a beauty. It exceeded the national qualifying requirement for altitude by 23 feet, soaring to 798 feet before deploying its chutes. That flight had a duration of 47 seconds, just three seconds longer than the maximum qualifying time. The egg survived intact. Damien’s team, composed of three boys and two girls, had two launches Sunday with data good enough be submitted at the end of this month to the TARC administrators. Only 101 school teams will be chosen from around the country to compete in the nationals in May. Qualifying for the TARC is extremely tough and there was a judge on the launch course to watch every detail of Damien’s performance. “The rules are very, very strict and very, very explicit,” said Catherine Votovich, a senior who is team captain. “You have to meet a certain height, a certain weight, your lengths have to be almost exact in order to even qualify before you launch.” It’s a “unique” experience for students, according to Hudson, who is also director of the NASA Flight Training Aerospace Education Lab at Windward Community College. “What makes this unique as an activity for students is that they get to practice many of the branches of the physical sciences and integrate them into one project,” he said. “The other thing that is unique is that once the button is pushed, they can not un-push it. What they find out is that a rocket will do what it is constrained to do, and that may not be what it was designed to do.” Damien finished 19th out of 101 teams in the Team America Rocketry Challenge in 2014. The only other school team to qualify for the TARC was The Priory of St. Andrew’s Schools in 2008. That team was also advised by Dr. Hudson.