More on water (pop bottle) rockets
Looking at the stats for this blog, it seems that lots of people are interested in pop-bottle water rockets. Heck, who wouldn’t be! Cheap, easy, safe (relatively) and … FUN! So I did a little Googling to find more resources for you. Here’s a great quote I found on a NASA website devoted to the water rocket!
"Two-Liter Pop Bottle Rockets may well be the GREATEST PHYSICAL SCIENCE TEACHING TOOL EVER CREATED!!" Middle grades students can manipulate and control variables, see their hypotheses verified or refuted, and graph their findings. High school students experience the nature of science at its best. They can document their abilities with the following concepts: inertia, gravity, air resistance, Newton’s laws of motion, acceleration, relationships between work and energy or impulse and momentum, projectile motion, freefall calculations, internal and external ballistics, and the practice of true engineering.
Gotta love that! Now beyond the NASA website (which looks great for teachers and homeschoolers), I found one from St. Mary’s University here in Canada (this is where the pics are from) and a page by Dave Johnson, recently updated, that has some great resources as well.
This weekend is Victoria Day Weekend in Canada (the unofficial start of summer) and Memorial Day in the States (same, only different 
). Looks like a little pre-planning could let you end your picnic with a little rocket launch to wrap up the day.
Hmm, maybe that’s why I’ve been drinking so much pop lately … I’m making sure I have supplies to build water rockets, yeah that’s it.
Right.
Tags: water rockets, pop bottle rockets, rocket experiments, experiments with kids, home experiments
20 Comments
Hmm pop bottle rockets Myth Busters has a great episode on Pop bottle Rockets and launching humans apperently you can download it off bit torent site.. you might enjoy it also
Oooh ah … gotta love it. Did you see the salami rocket? Salami as a solid rocket fuel.
Nope didnt see it
Ah too bad … it was a follow up to the Civil War rocket episode. Which blew me away (hee hee)
Pop bottle rockets are so cool! When I was in Physics in grade 11 we had to make rockets with eggs as the pilots and figure out how to make the egg survive the trip. my live and I got an A+ WOOHOO!:) Oh eggbert…he didn’t survive much longer after his flight. My mom made an omelet out of him when i brought him home. so sad! He makes it to space and then…dead in the pan!
Ah, too bad. Well at least you got an A+ you smarty pants you
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how did the egg not break on you? what did you do/use? if you get this please e-amil me at sparkle_fun_robin@hotmail.com
nice you should make it into a myth
well i just got a year 11 physics assignment on bottle rockets… i gotta use experimental data to present a written report.? i gotta use the concepts as well as the maths tehcniques and formulae that we learnt this term, which is pretty much just universal gas laws.. any ideas?
Bottle rockets are a good choice. You have controlable volumns, etc. You can work on force calculations bringing in the whole physics of it.
The National Science Foundation has a lot of good experiment examples to look through.
thanks heaps
please tell me how you got your egg to live? i have to do it for chem-phys and its due on wednesday! so please email me how at jigsaw918@yahoo.com or if you have XBOX 360 LIVE my gamertag is JiGSaWxEOP
Yeah man I need to do this project too, so if you could tell me how you got the egg to stay intact email me @
[e-mail removed]
thanks
I use Pop bottle rockets in my shop class and my science classes. This year, I have had an itch to make and launch a tandem engine rocket with two bottles side by side…and we did it….I want to know if there is anyone else out there who has figured out how to set up a multi bottle launcher! My first rocket flew great…only it flew in a perfect arc to about 350 feet, then down into the roof of the school…oops…
waz up i am macking a water bottle rocket in sci class and i need help plz
Adam … okay happy to help. Word of advice … Net slang is cool in IMs and on MySpace, here, not so much.
What do you need help with?
hi- i like science very mucho! i want to be able to build a model rocket out of 2 liter pop bottles. i like this site because it helps me with the information i need!
One of the tricks with building a multi-”engined” water bottle rocket involves balancing the torque from the two “engines” (the water jets). Almost always, one side will have more force than the other (or, one will run out of “fuel” (water) first). Since most of these have the axis of force pointed straight up, with any imbalance in the force, you have a torque (difference in force between the two engines multiplied by the perpendicular distance from the axis of thrust to the center of gravity of the rocket vehicle). A torque applied to a object will tend to cause it to rotate (with the speed of rotation determined by the angular moment of inertia of the object). Thus, the imbalance causes it to turn, making it fly in an arc.
There are a couple of ways to counteract this. One approach would be to carefully balance the thrust from the two sides. But, that’s hard to do in practice. Another would be to angle the two rockets so that the axis of thrust goes through the center of mass of the rocket vehicle. That way, any imbalance in the thrust will not result in a torque on the vehicle (since the perpendicular distance between the axis of thrust and the center of mass is zero). It may tend to fly slightly sideways, but it won’t fly in an arc.
Yet another approach would be to spin the vehicle so that the torque is applied to different sides so that it balances itself. But, I’m not sure how practical that would be for a water bottle rocket (although this is one reason why some early rockets and missiles did spin).
Dave
bottle rockets are dumb and u guys are nerds
how did you guys make your rockets? I have grade 9 tech and im supposed to make the egg live but my so far attempts have been destroyed. please help me!
email me at hayaesrar@hotmail.com