Rockets

We've been building model rockets as an extended family for a few years now.


Since before this kid was this small.







A brother in law taught us the basics of do it yourself.

Paper towel tube with an easter egg nose cone and cardboard fins. Engine mounts of cardboard with paper clip engine hooks. Rubber band shock with a plastic bag parachute. Everything glued together with liberal amounts of craft and white glue and decorated with craft paint.

The rockets usually go up and come back down. It's best if the parachutes come out before they come down, or the rocket will attempt to impale someone.

Some designs have attempted to impale people at takeoff, though we've worked most of that out by now.

Our last launch went fairly well.

As usual, most went very well, but we kept losing them in the alfalfa field.

I think the field is either too small or too hemmed in by alfalfa.

Some say that our parachutes are just too effective, but we lost G's rocket in the alfalfa too, and her parachute didn't deploy.

We had a lot of engine mounts blow out of the rockets.
I was trying really hard to avoid this problem, and thought that using craft glue with a long drying time would work.
But one of my engine mounts still blew out.
I'd forgotten to cut the hole in the top, so that may have had something to do with it, not sure though.

I wonder what else we could do to make them more stable??