After we launched our 1st rocket, we needed to design and build our 2nd rocket. It was hard because you needed to change your rocket in one way. You had to take what you learned from the 1st launch and and what the other teams had that made them do well. It was also hard to agree on things. We mostly looked at the team’s rocket that went the highest because theirs was the only one that went higher than ours, so we wanted to know why.

For our 2nd rocket, we decided to change the body. This is because if we change the tube to a thicker tube, the air pressure is the same but the air inside the rocket has more room, so more air can go from the pump to the rocket body. This will make the rocket have more thrust, so it will go higher. There was a little bit of arguing about what to change because we didn’t know if the thicker tube would work so we didn’t know if we should use it. But in the end we worked it out.

Our 2nd rocket design was pretty similar to our 1st rocket design. It was hard to tell that we were changing the body, but when we labeled it, it was okay. We had the thicker tube so that the PSI is the same, but there’s more thrust. Our fins stayed the same because they aren’t too big, so they won’t weigh the rocket down, but they are big enough so that the air repels off the rocket. We also kept our nose cone the same because it really good and tall, and it really cuts through the air and it didn’t push against the air too much, which would slow the rocket down.

I think that building our 2nd rocket was fun because we all knew from our last rocket what worked, and what didn’t. For example, wrapping the nose cone in tinfoil didn’t work, so we didn’t do that again. We made our nose cone out of cardstock, so that it wasn’t flimsy and bendable. We made our body out of cardstock too so that when the air went into it, it wouldn’t push the paper out wider. Finally, we made our fins out of cardboard because if we had made them out of paper, that they would bend all around. We didn’t cover them in tinfoil this time. There was a little arguing about who glued what, but we figured that out, too.

Building our 2nd rocket.