Rocket Activities

Goal: During these pre-building activities, or group was charged with following the directions and building five separate straw rockets and one stomp rocket. The point of these activities was to build a rocket on a smaller scale, allowing us to experiment with design choices such as fin shape and size and weight distribution.

Straw Rockets

Building Process: Because the instructions were given to us, we built the rockets with little trouble. Throughout the process we had to make many creative decisions. We had to decide both how many fins to do and of what shape, and how to craft a small, pointy nose cone from the available materials.

We ended up deciding to do four, triangle shaped fins to evenly cut through the air and stabalize the rocket. Additionally, we decided to fashion a nose cone out of a mixture of paper and tape that worked well to make a sharp tip to cut through the air. We also made one of our rockets with fewer fins and one with a different nose cone to test these variations.

Results: In the end, our straw rockets were all very successful, but the most successful was our original rocket with a paper and tap tip and four triangle fins. This design was the most aerodynamic and we were very happy with this design, so we decided to use this on a larger scale for the real rocket.

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Stomp Rocket

Building Process: We ran into only a few minor hiccups in the construction of our stomp rocket. These were caused mainly from our misunderstanding of directions, such as us taping the pipe into the rocket originally and having to restart. We implemented the design we liked from our straw rockets into the stomp rocket and had four triangle fins and a nose cone made of folded paper and tape.

WhatsApp Video 2024-07-11 at 11.09.47_ad00dae9.mp4

Results: In the end our stomp rocket was very successful. It managed to get up high and follow a clear flight pattern back to the ground. The one thing we would do if we were to redo this project would be to make our rocket shorter and more compact. Doing this would reduce the mass of our rocket, allowing it to fly higher and for a longer duration. We would also be sure to fully close and tape every opening to ensure 100% of the air is trapped inside the rocket to optimize its launch.

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