Greetings from Indonesia!

[RocketScientist]

Greetings from Jakarta, Indonesia! I am 13 years old and I have a strong interest in physics and rockets. I am in the 7th grade and next year in the 8th grade, we are going to launch water rockets as the school tradition follows. I am planning to make a huge 2-stage rocket with boosters and a parachute recovery method, and I want to make one of the best water rockets in the history of my school, which is one of the reasons why I registered at all. I have big dreams, and some day I want to work in some university or NASA and be a physicist or a rocket scientist, but bad news, I suck at mathematics, but the good news is that I am great at science. Please give me a warm welcome, and if possible please send me a link to making a simple 2-stage rocket with boosters that go really high in the comments. Thank you.

[U.S. Water Rockets]

Welcome to the forum! It is really cool to have such an enthusiastic young person with big plans on the forum. Would it be possible for you to explain the rules of your school competition? If there are pressure limits or restrictions on the materials you can use, it will change the plans we can suggest.

Nice to have you here!

[RocketScientist]

Actually, it's not a school or a competition, it's a class activity, but 8th graders in my school do that every year. I'm only preparing so that I can build the most awesome rocket in the grade, or even in the school history, and I'm not very sure about the rules, but it seems like that you can build any design you want as long as you have yourself a water rocket, and it is due until a certain date, and that day we'll each have a test flight. When I was still in elementary school, when it was recess time it was physics class for the 8th graders, so I always watch them whenever I can. Some of them couldn't even launch at all, and some could fly but not so high. The school record actually happened 2 years ago; it infiltrated our neighbor's lawn and flew out the school walls. I hope that I can do better, and you can help me.

[U.S. Water Rockets]

Actually, it's not a school or a competition, it's a class activity, but 8th graders in my school do that every year. I'm only preparing so that I can build the most awesome rocket in the grade, or even in the school history, and I'm not very sure about the rules, but it seems like that you can build any design you want as long as you have yourself a water rocket, and it is due until a certain date, and that day we'll each have a test flight. When I was still in elementary school, when it was recess time it was physics class for the 8th graders, so I always watch them whenever I can. Some of them couldn't even launch at all, and some could fly but not so high. The school record actually happened 2 years ago; it infiltrated our neighbor's lawn and flew out the school walls. I hope that I can do better, and you can help me.

Ok. You have a deal, provided that you give periodic progress updates and let everyone know how you are doing. It is great you are working with a good deal of advanced notice because it will give you plenty of time to experiment and learn.

The first thing you should do is decide on what you want to build, or what your goals are. If you are trying to go for a record altitude or record flight time or distance, then you will probably be designing something completely different than you would if you were trying to build the biggest our most dramatic rocket.

But even before you get a firm design created in your mind, you can begin trying to find some local supplies that you will use to make your rocket from. The first milestone you need to accomplish is to build some type of launcher that will be reliable and will not break down. A very simple type of launcher which is very popular would be a cable tie launcher. We have a tutorial on how to make a good one on our multiply page http://www.uswaterrockets.com which you can look at for inspiration.

The big questions that you need to answer are whether or not there are good supplies of launcher pieces that you can get. If you have access to PVC plumbing pieces at a hardware store, you can take a look at them and see if any of them will fit inside the bottle to form the launch tube. Since people from all over the world look at this forum, it is difficult for us to say if you will be able to find a launch tube with the exact size to fit inside a bottle.

If you start with a launcher, you can fire off some bottles and not worry about anything but testing the launcher. Just take a bunch of empty bottles and fire them off the launcher and see if the launcher design can withstand the forces of launch. When you are happy, you can then start to think about improving the rocket.

[RocketScientist]

Thank you.

[U.S. Water Rockets1]

Thank you.

You're welcome. It will be fun to follow your progress.