We had a great New Year's Eve get together with our friends Ginger and Elliot Parker. As part of our festivities I (Bill speaking) decided that it would be really fun to stand out in the cold and launch a rocket to welcome in the New Year. Sounds innocuous, right?
Not really. You see, this wasn't just any rocket. This was a homemade rocket. The problem with store bought rockets is that you put a rocket engine inside of a rocket and then you launch it. Not a problem in the daylight because you can see where it's going and get it back. But if you want to launch the rocket at night to celebrate the New Year, then you won't be able to see the rocket land. It seems like a big waste to put together a rocket just to lose it. So I came up with a brilliant idea--why don't I just slap fins and a nose cone onto the rocket engine itself? I can just skip the rocket part altogether and just launch the engine. Genius. You may be asking yourself, "why haven't I ever seen a rocket like that before?" You may also notice that NASA has never done this either. Read on to find out why.
Armed with my brilliant idea, I made a small A class rocket to see what would happen. For those of you who aren't rocket nerds, an A class rocket is about the size of a chapstick container and only has about a half an inch of solid rocket fuel. These little guys only launch about 300 feet in the air when done correctly. After completing a successful launch of my A class test rocket it would be time to scale up the experiment. Now this is where I see that in hindsight I show a little lapse in judgement.
When I say "scale up the experiment," I'm not joking. I bought E class rockets. Again, for those of you who are not rocket nerds, an E class rocket is about the size of a roll of quarters with about 4 inches of solid rocket fuel. Still, that doesn't seem very big, but let me quote what the back of the box says about E class rockets. In the United States you "must be 18 to purchase in CA and NJ" and in Canada these rockets "may not be sold to a person under 18 years of age." The warning on the back of the box goes on to caution "do not launch model rockets in a manner that would endanger flying aircraft." You get the idea. These rockets are meant to go about a mile high. I thought that would make for a pretty cool nighttime launch and a great way to blast into the New Year.
The problem is, during my small scale launch the A class rocket went about 20 feet in the air, lost all of its fins and nose cone, spun around our heads shooting sparks everywhere, and crashed somewhere in the back yard. This is when NASA scientists go back to the drawing board, analyze what went wrong during the launch, reconfigure the rocket, and try again. But I didn't have that kind of time. I did my test launch at 10:30 p.m. and I didn't have time to reengineer a rocket in an hour and a half.
So, onward and upward, as they say. Except, this rocket didn't really go up. The first video is the setup, and the second is the actual launch. As you will see by this video, homemade rockets can be fairly dangerous.
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5 comments:
The best part of those videos is how the video cuts off with Elliott saying, "There's smoke coming out of your roof!" Hahaha
We had a great time, no better way to welcome in the New Year than with good friends and a great pyro show!
Too funny! We love shooting off rockets. One of our rockets is still hanging in a tree in Maine! We've never tried shooting off just an engine, but Dale's tried to attach several engines to one rocket before. Not so successful.
Hello Sarah!! Its Amber in Mesa with the twins and triplets. I loved that video of your husband it reminds me of something my husband would do. I really believe that husbands and kids make life fun! :) Hope all is going well with you and the boys. Check out our blog sometime if your can we have an awesome video of our kids being elves. multiplemultiples.blogspot.com
Bill, this reminds me of stuff we used to do when we were younger.
Except I always remember me getting the spankings.
Sorry for the blog stalking but we're friends with Ginger's little sister Judy out here in California and she sent this post to us. I actually do work for NASA and I knew it was going to be an exciting post as soon as I read, "why don't I just slap fins and a nose cone onto the rocket engine itself?", however my exuberance was short lived once you started talking about E Class(!!!) rockets.... but then I reasoned that you probably wouldn't blogging about the incident had someone been killed or otherwise seriously injured/maimed....so I read on. And I'm glad I did. Just wanted to let you know that the video was priceless and earned a bona fide 'lol' from me. I've always wanted to try that but never had the guts to do it. And I hope you don't mind, but unless this blog goes private in the next two days, I'll probably be showing this to some coworkers come Monday.
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