So we went to a large park in town to launch my rocket that I got for Christmas. It didn't take long to realize that building and launching were the easy part of this hobby. It was a little two stage rocket from the hobby store.
We did the countdown, hit the ignition, and the rocket disappeared into the sky without a trace. My daughter, 7 years old, surmised that it got too close to the sun and burned up. My theory is that the ejection charge blew the engine out from the bottom instead of blowing off the nose cone and deploying the chute. The last thing I saw was that the vapor trail stopped, and the rocket still had a ton of momentum and went out of visual range, and though the sun didn't burn it up, it did fly in that direction making it very difficult to see.
So I have a couple of questions. Is there a good way to tell if your top stage engine is in tight enough? The ejection charge has to move the wadding, the big rubber band, the chute, and the nose cone, all of which are held in by friction just like the engine. I used some masking tape on the engine as instructed, but I don't think that was enough. I was worried about it so I only used one piece of wadding. It seemed to go in there tight. Maybe I could have packed it more loosely.
My second question comes from my surprise at how high the thing went. My eyes aren't nearly good enough to see such a small thing that high. Do you need some kind of spyglass for this hobby? My rocket was mostly black against a clear blue sky, and I could not see it. What are some good ways to solve this problem?
We did the countdown, hit the ignition, and the rocket disappeared into the sky without a trace. My daughter, 7 years old, surmised that it got too close to the sun and burned up. My theory is that the ejection charge blew the engine out from the bottom instead of blowing off the nose cone and deploying the chute. The last thing I saw was that the vapor trail stopped, and the rocket still had a ton of momentum and went out of visual range, and though the sun didn't burn it up, it did fly in that direction making it very difficult to see.
So I have a couple of questions. Is there a good way to tell if your top stage engine is in tight enough? The ejection charge has to move the wadding, the big rubber band, the chute, and the nose cone, all of which are held in by friction just like the engine. I used some masking tape on the engine as instructed, but I don't think that was enough. I was worried about it so I only used one piece of wadding. It seemed to go in there tight. Maybe I could have packed it more loosely.
My second question comes from my surprise at how high the thing went. My eyes aren't nearly good enough to see such a small thing that high. Do you need some kind of spyglass for this hobby? My rocket was mostly black against a clear blue sky, and I could not see it. What are some good ways to solve this problem?