Bottle Rocket Project

Here is a list of materials we used:

1 2 Liter Pepsi Bottle

1 2 Liter Sierra Mist Bottle

4 Foam board fins

4 Long pieces of string

1 Trash Bag (parachute)

Duck Tape

Hot glue gun

Cardboard cone

We cut one of the bottles and attached it into the other bottle and hot glued it and duck taped it so it stays intact. We cut out fins using foam board and x-acto knife then we covered the fins in duck tape. We cut holes in the trash bag and put string through it and attached it to the bottle. We made a cone and pocked a hole in it and attached it to the rocket and stuffed our parachute inside of the cone. 

Our overall rocket worked as planned but could not make the ten seconds. Our fins really worked as planned and really helped it stabilize our rocket and cut through the air. Our parachute did not always work as planned it was really inconsistent. Even when the parachute came out of the cone the parachute didn't fall accordingly. The parachute strings sometimes got tangled with each other at caused the parachute to not open fully.

The psi we launched at was about 60.

We filled up the bottle with about a third water.

This project taught me more about air resistance, velocity, gravity. I also believe that the fast, slow, stop slow fast really applies to this. I also learned that the strings of the parachutes need to be a perfect length. If its too short its not as effective, and if its too long the strings get tangled more frequently. 

I would really like to do this activity again to improve my rocket and make a really solid one. This was a really fun experience and I hope I could do it again in the future. 

Here is a picture of our rocket. Our best time was 8.08 seconds.