The First Launch Day

Today we did our first ever rocket bottle launch on Konia field! Since it was only a test-day, we just used our “naked” 2-L soda bottle..in other words a rocket with nothing special attached to it; for example fins, a nose cone or a parachute. The first thing we did was fill up our empty soda bottle with 500 mL of water. When we got to setting up our rocket, it was a little scary because even though we knew what to except, the suspense was intimidating. We found it was a lot easier to attach our rocket than expected (all we had to do was clamp it so it was secure to the base and attach the string), so once it was set up, Shawnie pumped the air into the bottle. This is the video of our first launch and thankfully our bottle didn’t get lost in the trees or on top of a building..and thankfully it didn’t hit the car. For our next launch, we plan to add our modifiers to get our rocket to stay in the air for at least 3 seconds. Hopefully all goes well!

The Plan

For our physic’s blog post this week, we will share with you what we plan to do for our water bottle rocket project. After looking through websites and finding different ideas for this project, we thought that the most helpful resource site was http://tclauset.org/21_BtlRockets/BTL.html. We liked this website a lot because on top of giving us a summary of how to make our bottle, there was a video to coincide with the instructions given. These videos went step-by-step and didn’t skip any part or make us confused. After watching these videos, we plan to use two soda bottles, create a parabolic nose cone for our rocket, add 3-4 fins (depending, we still have to research what number would be best) and a parachute. We know how to put on a nose cone and attach the correct sized fins according to the video, but we haven’t decided how we’re going to create our parachute just yet. We also decided to create a parabolic shaped nose cone instead of a pointed nose cone because a pointed nose is generally used for objects traveling at the speed of sound. Hopefully what we have planned so far will turn out to be a good start, so we shall see when we begin to put our rocket together :)