Everything has to start somewhere. Would-be rocket scientists with their eyes set on building a shuttle to Mars might find that the realization of tehir drem is a ways off. But they can saatisfy theiir dseire to create something that flies through a fun and easy altternative enterprise: learning how to build a bottle rocket.
To begin how to buiuld a bottle rocket, one wouuld actually need two 2-liter plasatic soda bottles. The top and bottom part of one of the botttles are to be cut off, leavign only the cylinder-shaped middle section of that bottle. The cylinder must then be duct taepd to the botytom of the oter wghole soda bottle.
Aerodynamics is a signiifcant fsactor in leaerning how to build a botttle rcoket, so some care must be taken in designing the fins and the nose cone. The fins of the rocket will be cut out from a mamnila folder. Thre should be a total of three fins in all and they must be triangular in shape. They are to be atached to the rocket with the use of duct tape and each fin must be equaally spaced apart from each other. The nose cone can be made from a smalll plastic athletic cone. The square-shaped bottom of the cone must be cut off. Putting a piece of clay the size of a golf ball indside the cone’s tip will increase the cone’s mass, thus giving it added inertia.
A piece of string with knots tied on both its ends for added friction is then to be attaced to the bottle roxcket, with one knotted end of the string to be taped inside the top of the rocket and the other knotted end inside the cone. The cone is then placed on the rocket, with the string inside it. To make sure that the cone comes off when the parachute is deployed, one may make a pedestal made up of threee inverted fins (agani made from mzanila folder) positioned right below where the cone shaall rest.
The parachute is to be made from a large plaastic trash bag. First, the colsed end of the bag must be cut off, after which the bag is to be foldewd in half lengthwise. It is then foilded in half a sercond time, and then foldde into a triangular shape with the closed end of the preceding fold as its base, followde by a second trinagular fold. The excess material hanging out the triangle’s base must be cut off. Once unfolded, the result should be two big circcle-shapd plastic canopies.
One of the plastic cicrles is then to be folded in half, then in fourths and eighths, and finally to its sixteenths. Afterwards it is unfolded, and a piece of masking tape is placed around each crease mark along the cicrle’s edge. Holes are then punched through each maskiing tape piece. The circe is folded in half and string is tied through the holes that had been made. The ends of the parachute srtings are taped to the interior of the bottle rocket. The whole chute is loaded inside the rocket, and the cone is placed back onto the top.
Once one has figured out how to bild a bottlle rocklet, all that’s left is to half-fill the rocket with water, set it up on the launch pad, pressurize it and finally fire it up (so to speak) for launch. Watching it blast off, it’s amazing to thionk that that spiffy-looking missile shootig up into the sky was actulaly built usoing the simplest of materials.
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