These past few days we have been working on creating a prototype rocket that we are going to launch soon, the reason of this was because we are going o NASA in just a few weeks and had no knowledge whatsoever on this subject. Our task was for each person to create and design a rocket, we had a choice in between the Alpha, the Viking, and the Wizard. Each rocket had a different setting, for example the wizard was fast and goes really high (this was the one I chose) the Alpha was really big and had a lot of force, the last one, the Viking went really fast but not as high as the wizard. Before we started creating our rockets we had to learn a little bit about the anatomy of a rocket and NASA. Below I will include pictures of the rockets (the first one is the one I chose)

Once we chose our rocket we went deeper into learning and the teacher showed us the anatomy of the model rockets compared to the real rockets. The model rockets usually consist of a nose cone, body tube, payload, parachute, recovery wadding, engine mount and a few other things. Obviously a real would be more complex but they are more or less the same, to compare I’ll show a picture of a model rocket and a real one to compare (the one on the left is a model and the other is a real one)

To create the rocket we had to go through quite a few steps. We first had to attach the fins, they varied from 3-5 and you could put them on in any formation as long as they are all straight. Next we put a little tube on the side to direct the rocket when it is launched. Then we attached a little ring near the find to stop the engine from just shooting through the rocket when it is launched, once the bottom was finished we moved on to the parachute and nose cone. We started by attaching an elastic to the top of the tube and the nose cone, then 5cm up the elastic we attached a parachute type thing that would slow down the landing. Once we where ready to launch we would spray paint everything and make your own design on it. Once everything is ready and we are outside and ready to launch we add the wading to protect everything and insert the engine and ignition.

A few days after we started building the rockets we watched a movie called Hidden Figures. It was based in the late 1950s in the headquarters of NASA. It was about a mathematician called Katherine G. Johnson who calculated flight trajectories for Project Mercury, the main point of this movie was to show the racial discrimination in the 90s and how it effected people. The point of watching this movie was to show us a different perspective from people who actually worked there and what it looked like.

It has been quite a few weeks since we have builded these rockets so I’m not quite sure when we will launch these, or if we ever will! But I will keep the blog updated if we do and insert a video and some pictures! And for the most part this project was really fun and I felt like I know some basic knowledge of NASA, rockets and shuttles!