Air traffic was dense in the skies over Concord on Friday morning, albeit mostly of the plastic soda bottle, old newspaper and tiny cardboard variety. The aerial show came courtesy of a bunch of industrious participants in the Recreation Department’s summer camp, who held an official rocket launching celebration to cap a week-long program put on with the assistance of the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.
Campers began the week with a crash-course in rocket construction, spent the middle portion of the week building their own creations – and adding some personality and flavor that led to products like the “LOL rocket” – and bookended the journey with Friday morning’s launch, which took place despite a persistent drizzle.
But the weather wasn’t enough to ground these flying objects, which were launched using a compressed air rocket launcher constructed by Tim Taber of the Discovery Center.
Campers could build the rockets out of whatever materials they wanted, though 20-oz. plastic bottles were a popular selection because of their snug fit over the launching mechanism on the compressed air machine. There were a few brave souls who used other elements as a base, including one rocket made entirely out of paper that didn’t survive the morning, shredding to a chorus of giggles when the pressure at launch increased from 40 pounds per square inch during the first round of takeoffs to 80 PSI on the second.
The lone requirements were that each rocket include a nose cone, a fin and a body.
“I’m very impressed,” Ryan Mahoney, outreach education coordinator at the Discovery Center and the man responsible for guiding the program, said. “They built them all on their own.”
And they all built them differently. By the time the day ended, Cameron Martin was holding a soggy craft whose newspaper nose was wilted like an old flower. But he began the day carrying out a unique vision.
“I tried to make a rocket but make it look like a jousting stick,” Martin said. When’s the last time NASA tried something like that? And when are the Olympics going to add space jousting as an official sport, anyway?
“I was going to name mine Pointer,” he added.
The longest launch of the day by far belonged to Chloe Morgan, whose rocket went more than twice as far as the next longest and technically came closest to leaving the Earth’s atmosphere. How close? We’ll never know. But by the time her invention had landed in the sandbox at the edge of the field where the rockets were being launched, the oohs and ahhs were multiplying.
“I thought the nose cone would make it go far,” Morgan said. “I thought the paper rocket might go farther, but on 80 (PSI), it exploded!”
Others were less surprised that Morgan’s rocket sailed off into space.
“I liked seeing other people’s rockets, like Chloe’s,” Aislin Claudio said. “The nose cone was humongous!”
The program was designed to be both hands-on and educational, beginning with a brief introduction from Mahoney on Monday accompanied by a demonstrated launch of a rocket. Mahoney returned Wednesday to consult with the designers and provide a popular “makeshift wind tunnel” using a leaf blower and an arrangement of tables to give the campers a chance to see how their rockets would respond to moving through the air. Mahoney hopes to develop the program into a week-long experience and is excited for the possibility that it will be something local schools will adopt.
He used the campers as his “guinea pigs,” and came away with his head in the clouds.
“It teaches them design and engineering from beginning to end. Kids are so used to finding mass-produced items on the shelf, but this gives them an idea how they got there,” Mahoney said. “It’s been a lot of fun; it was way beyond my expectations.”
