Exhibits & Activities On-line

Weekend Spotlight: Rockets

Make a Balloon Rocket!
Adapted from Wild Wings: Planes, Rockets, and Spacecraft to Build and Fly! by Peter Clemens and Shari Cohen, Lowell House Juvenile, Los Angeles, 1999

What you need:

• two 8 ˝” x 11 ˝” pieces of paper
• tape
• scissors
• balloon
• thread, 10 feet long
• OPTIONAL: a plastic drinking straw
• aluminum foil

What to do:

1. Roll one of the 8 ˝” x 11 ˝” pieces of paper into a long tube and tape it closed. The tube should be about ľ” wide.

 

2. Make a nose cone by cutting a “pac man” shape (like a round pie with a slice cut out) about four inches in diameter and shaping into a cone and securing with tape. Snip off the pointed end of the cone so that you can get thread through it.

 

3. Glue or tape the cone to the paper tube from step 1.

 

4. OPTIONAL: Cut the straw into three pieces of equal length. Cover each piece in foil. Glue or tape these “fuel tanks” vertically along the bottom of the rocket.

 

5. Guide the thread through the rocket by dropping one end of the thread through the whole body of the rocket, including the nose section. There should be thread emerging from both ends of the rocket now. 

 

6. Tie one end of the thread to a low point near the floor (such as a chair leg). The nose of the rocket should point away from this low point. Tie the other end to a higher point in the room, like a doorknob. Be sure the thread is tight and straight. 

 

7. Blow up the balloon as much as you can. Keeping the air hole pinched tight, tape the balloon to the middle section of the rocket, with the air hole pointing toward the back of the rocket.

 

8. Hold the balloon and rocket at the low point of the thread. Release the balloon to launch the rocket!

What’s going on:
Space rockets work because of Newton’s third law: for each force, there is an opposite force (or for every reaction there is a reaction). When a rocket pushes the fiery exhaust down toward Earth, the exhaust also pushes the rocket up to space! The same thing happens with this balloon rocket. When the balloon forces air out backward, the air pushes the balloon (and rocket) forward.