final rocket launches

A few problems we encountered through out the project included the parachute, the cone, the amount of water to put for the launches, the pressure, and the weather.

The parachute not coming out affected the rocket's performance because if it was able to come out more then the rocket would have been able to stay up longer more than just on the final day. The cone affected the rocket because it didn't fit properly so it kept falling off to early. It also needed to be a little heavier. Another problem we had with the cone was that it kept ripping apart from the rest of the rocket during the launch. We had a problem each time when launching trying to decide on how much water we wanted to put into the rocket to launch. This affected the performance of the rocket because each time we would do a launch we wanted to try different things but didn't know how we wanted to do it with the water. The pressure was also a problem for us because we didn't know exactly how much we should put into the rocket. It was also a little difficult to get it up to the higher pressure that we were hoping to get to. Finally, the weather affected our rocket launches because when it was to windy the rocket would fly a different direction and it was harder to keep the cone onto the rocket when we were getting the launch started. It was also very a problem on the last of our launches because it began pouring rain when we were about to make the launch which made it a bit more difficult for us to work in.

To fix the problems of the parachute not coming out and the cone ripping off, we tried to tie string to the bottom strings, which were attached from the parachute to the rocket, to the bottom of the cone. To make the cone fit a bit better we added strips of cardboard to the bottom of the cone to make it a little bigger at the bottom, which made it sit on the rocket a bit nicer. We also tried taping pencils to the cone to make it a bit heavier. For the problem with the water, on our final day we decided to try it once with less water then again with a little more so we could see if the rocket would go higher. With the pressure, after trying it at about 60 on the previous days, we just tried to get it as high as we could on the final day. As for our problems cause by the weather, we couldn't fix them but we just tried to work as best as we could with the conditions of each day.

The results of our solutions to the problem mostly were able to make the launch better. We were able to have our best launch after making the changes that we could.