Trip and Tina Barber Endowed Scholarship
Trip Barber, NAR #4322 and Tina Barber, NAR #29114 have been part of the NAR together since their marriage in 1976. Trip joined in 1963 and has been continuously active as a member and flier ever since. Tina has been part of his NAR activities since they first met while both were on active duty in the Navy, and has been his key supporter when Trip was NAR Vice President (1994-2008), NAR President (2008-2012), NARAM-31 Contest Director (1989), NAR Convention Director (2017), and NAR manager of the American Rocketry Challenge (2003 to date).
Trip grew up in Charlotte, NC, Rome, Italy, and Baghdad, Iraq, the latter two the result of his father’s occupation as a civil engineer. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics in 1973. He later earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA and graduated from the Army War College in Carlisle, PA. Tina grew up mostly in Colorado, where her father was a founding professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy. She earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Colorado and entered the Navy as a nurse, where she met Trip. She continued her nursing career as a civilian after their marriage, working part time as a nurse and full-time as a mother and later as a grandmother. They have two daughters and four grandchildren and live in Northern Virginia.
Trip’s professional career included 41 years of service in the U.S. Navy after his commissioning from NROTC at MIT. He spent 28 years in uniform as a surface warfare officer, serving on multiple different destroyers including commanding USS DEYO (DD-989). He later commanded the Norfolk Navy Base, the world’s largest naval base. His time ashore in uniform between operational assignments was all spent at the Pentagon, where he held various Navy and Joint Staff positions involving budget development and program analysis. When he retired from uniform in 2001 as a Captain, he became a Navy Senior Executive Service civilian and spent another 13 years in the Pentagon as the Navy’s chief analyst of future warfighting capability. He was awarded three Distinguished Service Medals or civilian equivalents over his 25 years of Pentagon service. After his civilian Navy retirement in 2014, Trip became the chief analyst at a consulting company and continued to lead analytic projects for the U.S. and Australian militaries.
Trip’s NAR rocketry activities in addition to NAR leadership roles have included competition, regulation development, and high-power flying. He has flown in over 25 NARAMs in the US and in 8 FAI World Championships around the world as a member of the US Team, winning 4 FAI bronze medals. He managed the US Team in the 2023 World Championships. He has been the NAR member of the National Fire Protection Association Committee on Pyrotechnics since 1994, where he has led the process of developing and writing all of the national safety regulations and safety codes for the rocketry hobby. He became the Chair of this Committee in 2023. He is high power Level 3 certified and a regular flier both individually and as the coach for several student rocketry teams. He co-founded the American Rocketry Challenge (TARC/ARC) in 2003 and has led the NAR participation in it ever since, serving as National Finals Contest Director every year and organizing NAR volunteers to help well over 100,000 6th through 12th grade students nationwide develop expertise and interest in rocketry and rocket science as the NAR’s premier STEM outreach program.
Trip and Tina decided that the NAR and its mission of “paying forward” to the next generation was so important to them that they endowed an annual NAR scholarship of $3,000 for a deserving NAR member student in (or admitted to) a university program in aerospace engineering.