Bottle Rockets~

Today, after a taking a challenging test on Energy & Work, we launched bottle rockets! We had to quickly prepare for our launch day tomorrow by gathering materials for our rocket yesterday so we could put it together today. It was suggested that we use two 2L soda bottles and a plastic cone like the ones from PE as a nose cone. It's hard to really decide on something because we aren't given instructions on how to build one. We can use whatever we want, but we have little guidance on what to do. At least looking things up on the internet is allowed, but it's also hard to try and combine advice from many different sites into one project. Our minimum requirement for time in the air is ten whole seconds! That's really hard to do, even with a parachute!

One of the obstacles in our way was getting the nose cone off so that the parachute could deploy. This is difficult because of the air pushing on the cone when is is shooting up in the air, plus the force of gravity pushing it down on the rocket. We made our rocket out of two 2L straight bottles nestled in one another. For the cone, we cut a large circle of very thin cardboard and formed it into a cone shape. For the fins, we cut three 4x12 centimeter triangles and hot glue gunned them to the lower part of our Rocket. We then layered both with duct tape twice for weight, stability, and structural support.

On our first launch, we exceded the minimum required time amount by 1.41 seconds! Our rocket ended up going for 6.41 seconds, an awesome start for our first attempt. We'll see how it goes tomorrow...