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Water Rockets (What I Have
Learned so Far) by Bill
Kuhl http://www.scienceguy.org
Water Rockets (What I Have Learned so Far) by Bill
Kuhl http://www.scienceguy.org
The idea to try water rockets came to me after helping with a parks and
recreation summer camp that was entitled,
"Model Airplanes and Rockets". For at least one summer there were e no
rockets but we built kites instead of rockets,
and of course there was little wind. I had built solid fuel rockets as a kid
but I knew that would be rather expensive for a large
group, so I thought the water rocket idea would be cheap once I purchased
a launcher. Some people build their own
launchers, but I purchased the better launcher from Pitsco. At first, I just
built rockets that had no recovery system at
all, this makes things simple if the rocket survives the crash.
Below are pictures from a park and recreation group, they built the
rockets mainly from construction paper which
does not hold up to a high-speed launch, but the kids sure had fun!
For water rockets you need a good quality pump, the pump on the left in
the below left picture was a cheap one and did not hold up.
The middle picture shows how the Pitsco AquaPort launcher grips the
bottle. Another requirement will be a method
for bringing water to the launch site and pouring it into the rocket.
The launch of a water rocket is really fun to watch, within the first few
feet all the water has been emptied from the
bottle and the rocket can be going over 100 m.p.h.! Safe practices are a
must.
Parachute recovery is really cool, but it is difficult to get reliable
deployment every time, I tried a few methods with