The egg launch!!!

So over the weekend we built one of the cheesiest rockets one can make. This project involved an egg, a tube of toilet paper, an ESTES C6-5 engine, 3 small balsa wood stabilizers a plastic bag cradle for the egg, and a chute made of grocery bags about 20 inches in diameter.

In this particular project we chose things around the house, and nothing purchased. The toilet paper roll came from a typical roll of Charmin brand toilet paper. The roll of TP provides about 1 inch or less of space from the explosive charge of the engine, to the parachute/cone area, this doesn’t leave much room for a reasonable payload to make it worth a C series engine. To take advantage of the small amount of room, we decided to use a plastic grocery bag for the parachute. Plastic grocery bags make great parachutes if you can avoid any sort of contact between the heat blast during ejection charge and the plastic.

In our launch we folded the parachute a bit differently than normally as we had limited space. This typically does not affect anything but how close to the ground it eventually deploys. Given the size of our rocket we felt 5 seconds was enough time to reduce egg splashes over folks at the park.

This particular launch took place in a park in Bradenton, Florida. Initially when we arrived, there was no one but us at the park. Within 15 minutes cars started pulling in and we had enough time to rush one launch.

Since we didn’t have straws at our house, we did not have a guide mechanism to properly launch and aim the rocket. We knew this would be a grass launch which on its own provides for a very unpredictable outcome.

To minimize unpredictable outcome, i made sure to stabilize the rocket in the grass. As soon as everything was set up i looked around at the other fields and saw folks arriving to play softball, baseball so on. We like to do our launches in parks when folks aren’t around.

The grass launch went as planned. Rocket went straight up with a steady trajectory.

Charge went off and parachute deploys… kind of.

The parachute suffered heat damage in the spot that faces the ejection port of the engine. This heat cause the chute to fuse together. The massive size of the parachute was meant to function as a streamer in case of exactly this scenario.

Egg landed in the field and did not break. Although many things were not ideal, we still had a blast launching that disaster of a rocket. Pictures for this event are limited as launch had to get rushed. No videos were possible as launch was very quick.

We are going to re-create this experiment hopefully this weekend to get some nice footage of the launch.

Second launch re-creations gone wrong. Although the first flight succeeded, the second one surely didnt.