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AIAA CbA CoI Participants and Interested Individuals,

During our recent full-community meetings, several of you expressed interest in comparing deterministic results for a subset of the Challenge Problem flight conditions. The organizing team will gladly facilitate this comparison and to this end will be scheduling a meeting on September 10, 2026 at 10:00 am US Central Time - meeting details will be send out later and also published here. This will be an opportunity for Challenge Problem participants to assess the consistency of their deterministic results with other participants. The organizing team will anonymize the results (e.g., using A, B, C, … identifiers) and tell each participant what their unique identifier is before the meeting.

In order to minimize undue burden on the Challenge Problem participants and the organizing team making the comparisons, only a single flight condition has been selected. The chosen condition corresponds to the lowest lift value in the sweep of CL at cruise Mach; more specifically, it is the lowest CL value for the Group 1 set of cases in Table 2 of the Challenge Problem paper (AIAA 2025-3107).

Participants interested in submitting their deterministic results should consult the Excel spreadsheet available here. As indicated in the spreadsheet, please indicate the following information with your submission:

1. Choice of structural model (simplified vs. full FEM)
2. Interface loads for each of the 9 attachment points (both in N and lbs)
3. Corresponding reserve factor for each of the 9 attachment points

Please submit your response to the organizing team via our email address below. We kindly request that you provide your data by September 4 COB so that we have time to compile it ahead of the meeting. If there are any issues with this date, please let us know.

aiaa.uq4cba.sc@gmail.com

Regards,

the CbA CoI Organizing Team

Congratulations to our North Texas Colleges!
International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC)
15-21 June 2026 
Spaceport Midland, TX

15^th Place - UT Dallas (10K’ Student Design) pictured above
31^st Place - UT Arlington (10K’ COTS) pictured below
52^nd Place - Tarleton State (10K’ COTS)
126^th Place - Baylor (30K’ Multi-Stage)
Out of 141 International Teams!

Special Awards 
UT Arlington
- Jim Furfaro Award for Technical Excellence
- Charles Hoult Award for Modeling & Simulation
- Nancy Squires Team Spirit Award - Runner Up
UT Dallas
- 10K’ Solid SRAD - 2nd Place

Moon Day STEM Event
Saturday, 18 July 2026
Frontiers of Flight Museum, Dallas Love Field
6911 Lemmon Ave, Dallas, TX 75209  (214) 350-3600
Moon Day celebrates the Apollo 11 landing anniversary and showcases the past, present, and future of space exploration. AIAA NTX along with SETP Southwest Section will again participate with our Flight Test Range & Sim.

1. Design, Build, Decorate a paper airplane.
2. Fly it on the Flight Test Range to measure time and distance.
3. Compute the resultant velocity, convert it from fps to mph.
4. Fly the Sim.
Volunteer! Morning or afternoon shifts available (please specify). Pizza volunteer lunch provided. Come early to fly our sim. Stay late to meet the astronaut for a picture & autograph. Or do both!

Keynote Speaker
Carl E. Walz (Colonel, USAF, Ret.) served as a NASA Astronaut (1990-2008). He logged 231 days in space on four space flights including the 196-day Expedition-4 crew aboard the International Space Station. Walz conducted three spacewalks totaling more than 18 hours evaluating tools for the Hubble Space Telescope refurbishment and outfitting the International Space Station. Walz graduated in 1983 as a Flight Test Engineer at the USAF Test Pilot School, Edwards Air Force Base, California.