Rockets!

Today we got serious with our rockets Mia, Tom, and I attached two 2L bottles together to create the body of our rocket and added fins. At first we also tried adding a parachute but we couldn't get it to deploy. After many close attempts where our rocket stayed in the air for about 4.78 seconds (just .12 seconds away from the goal of 5 seconds) we knew we had to make some adjustments before our rocket would be ready. We had originally used a simple shopping bag as a parachute but we swapped it out for a trash bag tapped to the inside of our rocket. We launched again and to our amazement our rocket stayed in the air for over 6 seconds and the parachute didn't even deploy. We knew we had to do something to get our parachute working so that we could increase our hang time. The ideal launch would be for the rocket to go as high as possible and then when it slows down at the top of its arch for the parachute to deploy. We changed our parachute again and used one of the trash bags in the classroom. We poked holes in evenly spaced holes on the top of our rocket and attached the parachute to the rocket using string. We then tapped a piece of string from the inside of the nose cone to the bottom of the parachute so that when the rocket went up and the nose cone fell off it would pull out the parachute from the empty upper part of our rocket. We tested it again but sadly it didn't work as well, but our fuel was spilling and we were being rushed inside by Jon, hopefully we'll do more tests tomorrow and we'll be able to get a 10 second rocket!!!

This is a picture of Tom setting up our rocket for a test launch. We have our nose cone on top which is just a cone with the bottom trim cut off. Then two 2L bottles tapped together, the top one cut open on the top and bottom while the bottom bottle is unchanged. We placed our parachute inside the top bottle (the greed bottle). Then finally our fins are tapped and equally spaced around the body of our rocket.