The End of the "Rocket Bottle" era

            On Wednesday, March 9th, the “Rocket Bottle” era ended. It was our last day, and really the only day that truly counted, to make 10 seconds. Our final attempts at making this standard were nothing short of a complete fail. The journey to our rocket’s last day was long, entertaining and definitely a learning process. When we started out everyone launched their rocket the same way; no modifications to the rocket, filled 1/5 of the way with water and a PSI of approximately 50. The results of that launch were satisfactory. The rocket went a great distance on the y-axis (vertical) and it was in the air for a decent amount of time. Though we were pleased with our results, we knew we had to make modification to our rocket to make it stay in the air for 10 seconds.  During the next 4 launch days we launched a myriad of times. We made adjustments to most of the launches; seeing what worked, what didn’t, adding modifications, improving the ones that seemed to work and removing what didn’t. Listed below are the details of each launch: time in air, PSI used, and modifications made. Our rocket launched peaked on the third day, staying in the air for 10. 5 seconds.  The cone was not attached to the rocket thus it fell off when we launched it. The goal of that day was to have a parachute that deployed, which we did have. The following day, seeing as how our rocket stayed in the air for already the 10 seconds needed, we made no modifications to our rocket. That time, though, our rocket barely cleared 5 seconds in the air. Confused, we tried launching again with no prevail. It was then that we realized the weather conditions affected our rocket launch more than we expected. For the final launch day, we prayed for good weather conditions because we knew that was the only thing that would allow us to meet the time requirement. Unfortunately, the weather conditions were not in our favor. Through out this rocket-launching odyssey we learned a few things:

1. Fins should be duct taped to the rocket, not just hot glued. They will come off when launching if not duct taped.

2. The higher the PSI, the better.

3. Weather conditions are very important. They can and will mess up your launch.

 4. The lighter the rocket, the more effective the parachute will be. i.e. having your nose cone attached to, instead of just sitting on, the rocket will weigh it down thus causing the parachute to not work as effectively and your rocket to fall faster. Versus if the cone is able to fall off the rocket, the rocket will fall slower because the parachute does not have as much weight to carry.

5. The less water, the more pressure. We are still unsure of more water or less water is better though. We did not experiment with the water level till the last day, keeping the water level at approximately 1/5 of the bottle. On the last launch day though we did try having more and less water, neither of which had an obvious effect our launch.