Rocket Man

I was talking to one of my students in one of the Intro classes the other day. He's a little older, so I figured him for a "career changer" or a hobbyist. He's actually sort of both. He's been working with computers for twenty years and now he wants to make rockets like the one in the photo. The one that went up 121,000 feet into the air! How friggin' cool is that. There's a cut-away view here of how the whole thing went together. There doesn't seem to be that much to this one. An eight inch aluminum tube with some fins welded on the bottom, a nose cone that pops off to uncork the parachute, solid fuel and an igniter. This one has GPS tracking and video cameras along for the ride as well.



I'm gonna have to be careful here. I can see me getting involved in this stuff real easily. I've grown up with the space program. I remember seeing Sputnik in the night sky while standing in my grandmother's back yard when I was seven years old. All of the early US space shots were televised, so I saw all of those. I've been to Cape Canaveral, Houston and Huntsville. And I read October Sky in one sitting.

Space, Shop Teacher Bob's last frontier.