Launch #4

Today we launched our water bottle rocket with different modifications. Today we needed to have a airtime of at least 5 seconds. We used the same wooden fins from our previous launch. We didnʻt want to change too much because of the great success we had on our third launch. On our third launch a couple of our fins came off the rocket when it hit the ground, even though the parachute worked well. This time we decided to change our parachute. We wanted a bigger chute so that it would slow our rocket down even more and keep it in the air longer. So we took a Kirkland trash bag and taped it to our rocket under the nose cone, similar to the way we taped our last parachute. Everything seemed to look good, but when we launched we were confused. Our rocket had barely gotten off the ground, thus the parachute didnʻt activate. Resulting in our rocket to land on the ground and a couple fins broke off. So back up to the class we went. We glued the fins back on and then re-attached our old parachute because we feared the new one added too much weight to our rocket. Again we launched our rocket only to have the same conclusion, it barely got off the ground. I think the pumps might have been the problem today. Although we did learn a very effective parachute technique that we will apply to our next launch. Next time we will try the same pump we used on launch #3 and we are going to use a new bottle, it seems the hot glue has warped our bottle and maybe even created a few tiny holes.We have some work to do, Back to the drawing board...