Rocket Lab vs Water Rocket Fun

What does it take to be a rocket scientist? You are a rocket engineer for a space exploration company. Your job is to design a series of rockets and attempt suborbital, orbital, and escape velocity missions. Successfully designing and launching a rocket into space is extremely difficult, expensive, and full of tough choices. Rocket components such as shape, propellant, control system, and staging affect the way a rocket flies. With each new mission, you must take into consideration each component’s reliability, cost, and performance. Have you chosen a powerful enough propellant? Is your control system prone to high failure rates? Failure is not an option here! The decisions you make will directly affect the success or failure of your rocket – and your space exploration company – because this is rocket science. With the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum's Rocket Lab, you can: - Build a virtual rocket by choosing its shape, number of stages, propellant, and control mechanism - Personalize your rocket with your name - Launch your rocket and watch how well it flies - Modify your rocket to test out different combinations and achieve mission success

This program can help students and rocketeers understand the physics of water rockets and how to optimize their water rocket launches to obtain the highest apogees. The interface is designed to be easy to use and understand. But don't be fooled by the program's simple layout, few if any of the other simulators you may find are as accurate. Under the hood this program is pretty sophisticated and thorough. The methodology includes both incompressible and compressible fluid mechanics along with a fair amount of thermodynamics and numerical methods to provide accurate water rocket apogee predictions. Check out the excellent correlation between simulation and sophisticated high speed digital camera results shown (see graphs) and at our web site. Software Includes: * Easy input of rocket launch variables * Rapid analysis of rocket launch * Generation of performance data plots * Rocket design aids & experiments * Simple launcher design blueprints * Altitude calculator