03.03.11 Third Launch Day

You know the quote from the movie National Treasure, where Nicholas Cage is talking about Thomas Edison. He said "Thomas Edison was successful. He found a million ways how not to make a light bulb". That is how I would judge our success today. We found out what not to do with the bottle rocket. The goal today was to have the rocket last more than 3s in the air and to have a parachute. Regarding our goals today, We met them. We also changed our cone and added a center of mass. We attempted to make fins our of cardboard but, unfortunately, they fell off. When we launched the clay that we added to make the center mass, was way to heavy and our rocket fell down quickly due to the greater gravitational force. Our parachute did not have a large enough surface area for the mass of our rocket. We took some clay off for our second launch and it helped a little. Our first launch was three seconds while our second launch was four seconds. We are going to change our parachute, add fins, and take all clay off. Hopefully it will work way better then today :)