Bottle Rockets :: essays research papers

A rocket in its simplest form is a chamber enclosing a gas under pressure. A small opening at one end of the chamber allows the gas to escape, and in doing so provides a thrust that propels the rocket in the opposite direction. Newton’s laws can be used to explain this his laws in the simplest terms can be explained like this: First law- Objects at rest will stay at rest and objects in motion will stay in motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Second law- Force is equal to mass times acceleration. Third law- For every action there is always an opposite and equal reaction. For the rocket to launch it needed to be propelled by something, for our rockets we used regular air and compressed it. Upon releasing the stopper Newton’s first law went into effect which states that for something to move a force must act upon it in this case the gas moving out of the bottle. When the stopper was pulled the pressure in the bottle forced its way down, which applied the force to start the motion of the bottle. His 3rd law can also explain this because the water going down forces the rocket in the exact opposite direction the water goes. Which is why one time when we shot the rocket it flew at an angle. Also it shows why the launchers had stoppers, because if they didn’t the cork wasn’t strong enough to hold that pressure and would cause the rocket to begin flight prematurely. His second law can be used to describe how high and fast the rocket will go. If you wanted it to go really high and fast you would just pump more pressure into it then if you didn’t want it to go that high. You can determine how much force is needed by multiplying the mass by the acceleration.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Our rocket was fairly decent the only problems were that the wings were not completely stable. Our egg survived in the capsule we built and one other egg even survived with out being in a capsule at all.