Johnny Rocket

This past Saturday John and I got his Air Hogs rockets out. It was a nice sunny spring day. The birds were singing just for the joy of it and because it has been dry, the field in the park behind our house was perfect, not muddy or overgrown.

The flights were perfect as you can see. It was a perfect windless day so the rubber tipped rockets flew freely but landed nearby.

But a fella likes to mix things up every once in a while. So John tried a little experiment. He counted the number of pumps and observed the height of the flight for each one. We found that one pump would not get the rocket off the pad. Two pumps propelled the vehicle about six feet. Three yields 15 or so, etc. Next time we will tie this in with math and do some trigonometry to more accurately measure the height of the flight.

Later we tried angling the launch stand to fire the rocket at 85 degrees instead of straight up 90...to no avail. The Air Hogs company really made these things fool (or prank) proof. At anything other then straight up 90, the rocket would just pop up about a foot or so.

Next time, we are getting some foam or balsa gliders from the hobby store. This field is just asking for it.

We will have to see how things turn out for this field. The township has been grading and leveling endlessly the past two summers. The soil is best described as top grade Pennsylvania shale, so we are not expecting much to grow there without a lot of help.