Day: Bottle Rocket!

Today, we basically worked on our bottle rockets and launched on the baseball field almost all day. To be honest it was pretty frustrating for my group and I (Remi, Taylor, and I) because our rocket wasn't working out the way we had anticipated and each time a different problem would occur which made things really frustrating. However, after finishing all of our launches, I can see that it was all just a kinetic process of learning physics and we did still do OK because we got 8.5 or so seconds out of a goal of 10 seconds.

I believe many things contributed to our not being able to make our goal such as wind trouble, we could never really attain a good water to air ratio, the pumps sometimes did not work the way they should have, and the most frustrating problem with our rocket was the fact that many a time our parachute would not come out as it got stuck in our cone at the top of our rocket and the rocket would just come straight down, which took much less time than if the parachute had opened up and our rocket had floated down. Our design (I thought) was actually pretty decent.

First, we used one full liter bottle of sprite (without the sprite before, but it was not cut or anything) and we taped the top third of a liter coke bottle over the bottom end of the sprite bottle. We then filled the sprite bottle one third of the way with water and cut a trash bag into a square (double layered) and put little pieces of tape on both sides on each of the corners and put string through and double knotted it to ensure that it stayed. We then taped the other ends of the string to the bottle evenly (four strings) and we bunched up the parachute and string and lightly put it into a cone that had a weight with putty around it attached to the top of the cone. We put the cone over the top of the coke side of the rocket and shot it up! (after setting up our launcher and pumping: which was much harder than it looked...)

We made our rocket with two bottles to make it longer and therefore shoot straighter (or go the way we aimed rather than tumbling around) and we also used the one with weight so that it would go up higher and when it flipped to come down, the cone would fall off and our parachute would come out. We decided to double layer our parachute so that it would not rip and basically used it for insurance. We used duct tape because we figured that that would be the best way to keep everything attached as opposed to a weaker tape and glue which can be really tricky and even time consuming.

I thought that we did pretty well with our overall rocket although I can not say it exactly the way that we had planned or anticipated. However, I think that because of this we were able to continue to redo and recreate, replan, and reconstruct our rocket to make it the best we could (this design is the one that got us to 8.5 seconds (not aunties)) I also thought that next time, we should maybe not use putty and tape instead inside of the cone because the parachute would sometimes stick to the putty and not come out due to the putty! The parachute not coming out was a pretty big issue because we would barely reach 4 or 5 seconds without it. If we ever get a chance I really hope I will have learned enough from this experience and be able to make 10 seconds next time!