Water Bottle Rocket Preview

Today, we did practice launches with our water bottle rockets. We created a more elaborate version of our water bottle rocket and we also created parachutes made out of trash bags. For our rocket, we cut the top off of a 2 liter soda bottle and attached it to the bottom of the complete bottle. We added cardboard fins to help the aerodynamic aspect of the launch, and we attached 20g weights to the bottom of our rocket to ensure that it would fly right side up. For our parachute, we used a whole trash bag. We cut slits to create the four corners of the parachute and made loops at the end in which to attach the parachute to the rocket using thin rope. Capping the rocket with a cone at the launch helped with the aero dynamicity of it and once it started to descend, the cone flew off and the parachute deployed. It was really cool to watch our simple machine fly so far up in the air and come floating down.