Space Exploration & Rocketry

During this unit, we will be learning as much as we can about flight & space exploration, from the Wright Bothers to Robert Goddard's rockets to the launching of Sputnik to the Apollo landing and beyond. Students will watch the HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon" during the course of the school year.

This project has 2 parts:

create the highest-flying rocket you can from a 2-liter pop bottle
Create a 2-page "poster" of a famous astronaut, mission, or event.

ROCKETRY ACTIVITY:

Discuss principles of rocketry
Design & build a rocket from a 2-liter plastic pop bottle and various scrap materials.
100 points

Water Rocket Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronauts_by_name
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/rocket/BottleRocket/index.htm
http://www.et.byu.edu/~wheeler/benchtop/
http://extension.osu.edu/rockets//index.html
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/pagrosse/h2oriphyl.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mir/mishaps.html
http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/TRC/Rockets/history_of_rockets.html
Rocket's Away
Water Rocket Lab
Leeds Water Rockets

Rocketry & Space Exploration Timeline

Create a 2-page "poster" of a famous astronaut, mission, or event
I will assign your topic. Each class will have different topics, as we will try to cover as many as possible.
Grading (50 pts.)

Students use 2-Liter pop bottles and reach heights of 300 feet using nothing but water and compressed air! More challenging than model rockets, students learn about center of gravity, center of pressure, and Newton's laws of motion.

First Law
Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and objects at rest tend to stay at rest unless an outside force acts upon them.

Second law
The rate of change of the momentum of a body is directly proportional to the net force acting on it, and the direction of the change in momentum takes place in the direction of the net force. (Unbalance of force results in an acceleration)

Third law
To every action (force applied) there is an equal but opposite reaction.

Find out what you would weigh on the other planets!Click Here!

To Fly is Everything
Rocket History
Space Primer
Human Spaceflight

Evaluation:

Flight #1 (40 pts.)
Flight #2 (40 pts.)
Effort/Teamwork (20 pts.)
200 ft.-40 pts.
180 ft.-38 pts.
160 ft.-36 pts.
140 ft.-34 pts.
120 ft.-32 pts.
100 ft.-30 pts.
80 ft.-28 pts.
60 ft. -26 pts.
40 ft. -24 pts.
20 ft. -22 pts.
On launchpad-20 pts.

Space Exploration & Rocketry

ROCKETRY ACTIVITY:

Water Rocket Links:

Rocketry & Space Exploration Timeline

Space Links: