May 09 2011
General Science project! Launching waterbottle rocket
Lately in Science class we have been learning about space and rockets. One of the Projects we did was making our own petbottle rocket and lauch it. We had 4 groups and we all had to design our rocket and make sure it could survive 3 launches with out braking. We could only use cardboard paper, tape, thick paper and of course a petbottle. We weren’t allowed to use A4!
Aim- To launch a water petbottle/rocket and see how far it can fly up in the air.
Predition- I think that the rocket from group 3 is going to fly the highest because theres looks like it is going to fly high.
Method- 1) Get 1 petbottle (the main body) and flip it the other way (so the cap part has to be at the bottom).
2) Draw 4 wings on the hard paper/cardboard paper.
3) Cut the wings out and then tape it on the lower part of main body.
4) Make a rocket nose so a tip points up.
5) Colour the tip in dark colours so it is easy to see in the sky when it lauches.
6) If you would like you can decorate which in our case we drew a penguin on the space we had on the bottle and then your done!
My prediction was wrong. 2 teams won! Group 1 and my group!! When we lauched the fisrt time it went really and group 3′s did not really go high so then i thought maby we could win but in the end my group tied with group 1. During this project, I learnt that the rocket with a smooth nose and stable wings fly the furtherest!! Also the nose has to be pointy and straight so the rocket can fly directly up instead of flying to the side.
Daniel,
EXCELLENT REPORT! Your description of the challenge of making a high-flying rocket was great and one of the few reports I’ve read that remembered it actually had to survive several landings! That changes your design doesn’t it? Excellent use of pictures – especially the one showing the use of the altitude tracker. I would like to have gotten your opinion about our method of determining the altitude our rockets attained. Any thoughts about errors? How about how the features of your rocket compared to the other ‘winning’ rocket? Very different designs…why did they both do so well?