Our water bottle rocket launching process is officially over. We can no longer make any modification nor launch again to see if changing anything will increase the rockets flight time. All in all this was a great experience. We learned how to engineer our own designs to create our own personal and unique rocket. The basis of our design was to use a 2 L water bottle as the body of a rocket while later adding on fins as well as a nose cone to increase the rockets time in the air. We started our design process by looking and mimicking other water bottle rockets we saw online.
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The picture above was one of the pictures as a model to help us design our own rocket. We thought the design process would be easy but man were we wrong. We thought the most practical way to make fins using the resources we had were to construct them out of cardboard. But with a little insight from Coach Chris we realized that we would have to duct tape the fins if we wanted them to last. We attached the fins by hot glue gunning them to the rockets body. Our next addition to our rocket was the nose cone. We needed a nose cone that would add more weight to the top of the cone. We constructed this by cutting off the top of one of our other water bottles and placing it on the opposite end of the fins. This enabled us to created our parachute. Our parachute construction was one of the hardest steps in our design process. We tried two ways of attaching our parachute. Our first was duct taping the parachute onto the base of the rocket. That way was kinda effective but at the same time didn't last 10 seconds in the air. Our second method was that we used string to attach our parachute to the base and shockingly it worked out way better then the first method. We faced many problems with our design but we somehow figured out a way to fix it.We found out many things that worked and others that didn't. The things that worked was a parachute that was attached by string. The thing that didn't work that was categorized in that aspect was when the parachute was attached by a fishing line. The fins actually worked well even if the sizes were not proportional. The changes we could have made for the future is that we could have designed our last one to have a little sturdier fins. If we had sturdier fins maybe they could have stayed on during the harsh landings our rocket took. If they stayed on it could have saved us valuable time wasted on trying to glue them back on and launch in the allotted time left in the period. In conclusion this lab was extremely fun and helped me realize that I can actually do things based on my groups design. This was an interactive yet very educational project. One of the best ones I was involved with all year.