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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Rockets are Cool
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This afternoon my daughter's girl scout troop had an outing to Goddard Space Center. The girls had put together some rocket kits recently - we had a kit from Estes rockets. It turns out that a local rocket club meets at Goddard once a month on Sundays, and helps anyone else who shows up launch a rocket. It's all pretty safe - the rockets are lit of electrically from a launch pad, so there's no fire, or fuses. Here's a shot I took just after my daughter's first rocket went off - I missed the launch itself (kind of hard to catch with a cheap camera phone :) )
That one went pretty well - it had a streamer instead a parachute, but it came down nicely and in one piece - we can slap another engine into it and try again sometime. Here's a shot of the second rocket, which looked like a cruise missile:
Again, I missed the launch itself. This one went up, but the parachute didn't deploy properly - and it came down hard. The nose buried itself in the ground, and the rest of the rocket came apart (it can be re-glued - it didn't actually shatter). Here's what that rocket looks like ( I can't find the first one on the estes site):
All in all, it was great fun - we'll definitely do it again.