final blog post

This whole project has been a great learning experience for us and has begun to further our understanding of  the practical applications of physics in everyday life. From the beginning- when we were given the basic ideas of how to make the rocket and being scared to even launch them, to now having made two separate rockets and launching countless times, we have gained quite a bit of knowledge and have a changed mindset when it comes to physics. It was hard work making those rockets and when our first one landed on midkiff potentially ending our experience right there, we were only motivated even more to succeed in creating the best rocket we could. So we made another with a simpler design and launched it three times on Friday. The first two launches went very high giving us times of around 7 seconds even though our parachute didnt deploy. We were launching our rockets with constant variables. For every launch, we used approximately 750 mL of water while pumping air at a pressure of around 60-80 psi. Having only a few minutes remaining in class for us to succeed, we swapped our nose cone out for a smaller one, one that we knew would come off. This was a success since our parachute deployed and allowed our rocket to gracefully descend to the ground. This amazing final launch gave us the class record of over 16 seconds of air time. We were quite lucky and grateful to have been given the extra day to recreate our rocket and would not have been able to get as good a result without that extra time.