Rocket Building

So today Amber and I started to work on our rocket. Here's the list of materials we used:

1. Two 2-liter bottles
2. An athletic cone
3. Duct tape
4. String
5. Garbage bag
6. Poster board paper
7. Clay/play dough
8. Scissors
9. Hole puncher
10. Water

What we basically did was cut one of the bottles so that only the part in between the top and bottom of the bottle is left. We then taped the cut up bottle to the intact bottle's bottom and used two layers of duct tape just in case. After that we put the athletic cone on the cut up bottle side of the rocket. The cone was too big, so Amber had to cut it because I'm weak. After we cut the cone we taped some string to it and the rocket so when the rocket launches the nose cone (athletic cone) would come off and the parachute would be able to work. With the nose cone now attached I started to cut out three fins for the rocket. We decided to have three because the fins would have added more mass to the bottom of the rocket and the rocket wouldn't stay up in the air for 5 or 10 seconds. We cut out the fins from the poster board paper and to make attaching the fins easier we had an extra centimeter on the two sides that would be taped to the rockets, like this:

http://www.lnhs.org/hayhurst/rockets/

http://www.lnhs.org/hayhurst/rockets/

So after we taped the three fins, Amber constructed our test parachute. She cut the garbage bag and taped eight equally spaced spots on the edges of the garbage bag, she then hole punched each taped spot and tied a string to each hole. We taped the parachute to the rocket and put it in the nose cone. We then launched the rocket and our time was 7.06 seconds. Pretty good since we didn't have a clue on what to do.