Model Rocket Launch – February 20, 2010
A few weeks ago Johnathan had a sleep over at the Virginia Air and Space Museum with his Cub Scout pack. One of the activities they had was to build a model rocket and launch it the next morning. Johnathan really enjoyed it so I figured it would be something that me and him could do together.
I ordered a kit from HobbyLinc.com, the Estes Tandem-X Model Rocket Launch set.
The kit came with two model rockets, a launch pad, launch controller, parachutes, etc. Basically everything you need except for glue and engines. I also order a bulk pack of 24 B6-4 engines.
Over the last couple weekends we assembled the rockets and today we got to go out and launch them. We went over to my brother’s house since he has a pretty good size piece of property with plenty of room in the backyard and Johnathan, Sandy, Mary Shannon, Carlie, Little Christopher, and Colin launched the 2 rockets a total of 11 times.
Here are quick videos I took of two of the launches with my iPhone.
The Amazon rocket is huge and was the easiest to assemble.
The Crossfire rocket is small and fast. Just watch both the videos and you can see the difference. This rocket also flew at least twice as high as the Amazon.
Both rockets flew great. After about 4 launches the Crossfire’s parachute was taking a pretty good beating, and the last launch it did not fully deploy. It took a good hard landing but survived fine. The Amazon’s parachute deployed perfectly every time.
We were having way to much fun to worry about taking pictures or videos of every launch. I still have thirteen engines left and we will definitely get out and do this again another day.
What a blast!
