Team Rocket!!!!!

Design Features

-Play-doh

-2 L Bottle

- Top of bottle

- Cardboard

- Hot Glue

-Duct Tape

Our rocket was a fairly simple design. It had the two liter bottle. We got some scrap cardboard and used a template from the internet to make the fins. We wrapped a piece of paper around the bottle to measure the circumference (35 cm). Then because we had three fins we divided that by 3 leaving 11.6666 cm. We placed our fins every 11.6 cm so they were evenly spaced. Then we used a simple garbage bag parachute. We put plato on the top of the bottle we cut to make it top heavy and reduce spin. Then we folded up the parachute and glued its 4 strings to the bottom of the 2L bottle.

Everything worked pretty much as planned. Our top came off, our parachute deployed. However, our rocket didn’t go as high as it probably could narrowing down the problem to either the pump or the shape of our fins which aren’t as streamlined and shaped around the bottle as possible causing some air drag.

Launch conditions:

When we launched our rocket, our pump was continuously leaking air.  Because of this, we were not able to get a good measurement of psi.  Our best guess at the psi is about 50.  As we pumped, the needle fluctuated between high 40’s and low 50’s.  We filled our bottle about 40% with water because we had heard from Jonas that 40% was the optimal percentage of water.  

What We Learned:

We learned that it helps to have as low a mass as possible in order to slow the fall and allow the parachute to effectively slow the fall.  We also learned that weighting the nose cone and adding fins makes the rocket fly straight and helps the parachute deploy.  When it comes to non-physics related things, we learned that the design doesn’t need to be complicated to work. With our previous tries yesterday, we cut two layers of garbage bag into octagons and had 8 strings attached. We also tried using two chutes because we know that drag racers use that to slow down so it seemed like a good idea at the time. However, our simple design was more effective meaning that the effort we put in to space fins evenly (which we didn’t bother with before) was worth it. We also took more care into folding up the chute so it would unfold in flight.

Final Thoughts

We are proud of our rocket time of 10.8 seconds. After we are done writing this we will probably go back outside and try to get a longer time. It is very important to us that we beat Jonas and Cameron. Team Rocket was not just lucky with our design. We put thought into our design and it was ingenious in its simplicity.