NAR and TRA numbers
 

I saw a guy post to the TARC page today who seemed to have recent high numbers in both NAR and TRA:

NAR # 99333
Tripoli #15861

The notable thing to me is TRA is 50% higher numbers, but has about the same number of active and certified members as NAR and there is a high degree of crossover. Perhaps 50%?

By comparison my NAR number is 24333 which IIRC was started around 1972 and my TRA number is 012 which was started around 1985.

It appears TRA has a much higher uptake rate on new members and has a higher attrition rate as well.

Hmmm.

Jerry

We all want to go faster, higher, hotter, bigger with almost everything....cars, women, rockets, etc. Adults finally have enough money to blow on a very expensive membership and HPR hobby. They do the HPR thing for a while and find that it is a black hole money pit. They build bigger and bigger rockets to out-do their compatriots, which means they have to spend more and more. They have to travel long distances to get to waivered fields. Their wives get tired of them going off to a hotel every few months to spend a grand or more for hotels, motors, etc. I can easily see how TRA gains and loses much faster than NAR. I went through the exact same process, but I did EX and didn't spend near as much on motors as folks that do large commercial motors. I still spent waaaaaaaay too much.

Which is why some of us never waste time and money on HPR to begin with...

Later! OL JR :)

NAR: 27085 (joined 1974, maybe 1975?)

Tripoli: 696 (joined 1988)

I had a fairly local field and a good friend that was big in EX, so it was expensive but not nearly as much for me as the vast majority. The big rockets eventually got boring for me, but the EX motors were fun. Then Pepcon went up...literally, making AP a pain to get, and the BATFE went Nazi. I decided I'd had enough. I let the TRA membership expire and kept my NAR.

Current highest NAR number given out is somewhere 'tween 100650 and 100700.

Both orgs used to publish publically a list of HP certs which could be used to compare at least HP membership levels, but neither org does that now. NAR provides a search for a single HP member if their number is known. TRA may provide a similar service to members or prefects, but there is no public interface and I haven't been a member in 23 years so I can't check.

The last such comparison I was able to make was two years ago. At that time TRA had a little over 3200 HP cert members (which was about 400 more than NAR) and was gaining about 700 new members overall a year, while NAR was gaining about 2200 new members a year, and was way ahead in level 1 certs while way behind in level 3. Of course, NAR has traditionally had high attrition due to one-time only members, and I would think TRA is only slightly better. From the top membership numbers at that time I was able to determine that NAR had about 5500 total members to TRA's 3800. The November 2013 Electronic Rocketeer from NAR gave the official total as 5602, so at least for NAR, my methodology is reasonable. In summer 2015, the high power total for NAR had increased to 3032, with the level numbers growing consistently. There is probably considerable overlap in those high power numbers (i.e. high power flyers who are members of both orgs), but there's really no good way of determining how much without seeing the actual membership lists for each org.

Current official NAR membership is 6381 according to the October 15 Electronic Rocketeer.

Power level comparisons probably aren't very accurate for who is flying HPR in NAR. I used reciprocity to get my NAR level 2. I can't remember if level 2 is all NAR had at the time or if I just transferred it when I was still level 2 in TRA. Makes no difference now since my TRA membership has long since expired.

At any rate, I never flew a high power rocket with my NAR cert. It was all done under TRA. I'm sure there are plenty of folks like me that have cert levels that they transferred from TRA to NAR but never used the cert. Who knows, there might even be a few folks that transferred cert levels from NAR to TRA, but not enough to call it even.

I saw similar things when I was into high power in the 90s for about 10 years. Unlike most in our club, I did some model rocketry during that time, and I also threw in some mid-power flying. For me, I became more interested in scaling up rockets I built as a kid, and less about sending some rocket way past my range of vision. Many of the new HPR flyers we would see at a launch had never flown model rockets. They'd jump into HPR with almost dizzying enthusiasm, and want to progress up the alphabet of motors as fast as possible. I often told new members in our group to slow down, and enjoy the ride. For some, the thought of not immediately getting their L1 was almost comical. Absolutely no patience. A few had some failures trying to progress much further because they just did not take the time to learn anything about building rockets to handle bigger motors. Some dropped out of the hobby almost as fast as they started, and a few just could not afford (or could not see the justification of) the higher cost of getting that next motor letter. It was an insatiable goal. It was time to move on to a new hobby perhaps, that could give them a thrill at a lower price point.

Not really comparing power levels, except that they were fairly consistent year over year. Like I said, it is assumed there's a lot of overlap, and even mismatched overlap as in your example, but there's no way to tell how much without a direct comparison of the two lists, which no one except the keepers of the lists would be able to do, and then only together. About the most one can infer is that level 3 flyers gravitate to TRA, and lots of people do their Level 1 flights as NAR.

+1 times many.