Finn got two
vinegar and baking soda powered rockets for Christmas. Spring means that at long last we get to play with the fun stuff after a long wait.
This is a short film of one of the better trials. The fat guy launching it is me.
The way it works is simple if not inelegant. You attach fins to a 1-liter soda bottle, then apply an extension of the tube and a nose cone if you like, to make the rocket longer. I thought the extension was hokey and useless - just cosmetic - so I dropped that and adhered the nose cone directly to the bottom of the bottle (which is the top of the rocket).The rest is tricky. You fill the bottle with up to 1 cup of vinegar, then hold it horizontally. Next, you take a tensioned stopper and shove it into one end of a tube that just fits inside the bottle. You fill the tube halfway with sodium bicarbonate, and then carefully stick the tube in, open-end first. Now you tighten the stopper - all the while holding the bottle level and horizontal. Once you have it tightened sufficiently (the amount of tightening takes some experience learned the hard way), you shake the bottle, set the rocket fins down and nose up, then stand back and hope.
