Blogpost #6 - Final Launch

Today was the last launch day for the bottle rocket project.  Yesterday we spent our free period 7 attempting to launch the rocket we had been working on from day 1.  The weather was actually nice, so we thought that the rocket would be able to have a higher air time.  After wasting 80 minutes of failed launches and modifications, we decided that the rocket would simply not work because it was too heavy to stay in the air for the time we were aiming for.  We made the decision to use a new 2-liter bottle and start from scratch.  In class today we only attached a parachute and a nose cone to our bottle. Surprisingly, that was enough to keep our rocket in the air for 10 seconds. Even though we were also a bit worried about the weather, which was really rainy and windy, we ended up learning that since the rocket was so much lighter, the parachute could actually catch the heavy winds and keep the rocket suspended in the air.  So, the wind factor actually really helped us out.  For the final launch, we used 600 mL of water and pumped a lot of air into our rocket so it would have a high air pressure and ultimately would be able to reach a higher height. The rocket really did not have many modifications, so the lesson we learned from this particular launch is that sometimes the simple things can work best. We uploaded 3 videos: 1) Our 3 second launch, 2) Our 10 second final launch, 3) Our celebratory video haha :D