This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Rockets are Cool Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

This afternoon my daughter's girl scout troop had an outing to Goddard Space Center. The girls had put together some rocket kits recently - we had a kit from Estes rockets. It turns out that a local rocket club meets at Goddard once a month on Sundays, and helps anyone else who shows up launch a rocket. It's all pretty safe - the rockets are lit of electrically from a launch pad, so there's no fire, or fuses. Here's a shot I took just after my daughter's first rocket went off - I missed the launch itself (kind of hard to catch with a cheap camera phone :) )

That one went pretty well - it had a streamer instead a parachute, but it came down nicely and in one piece - we can slap another engine into it and try again sometime. Here's a shot of the second rocket, which looked like a cruise missile:

Again, I missed the launch itself. This one went up, but the parachute didn't deploy properly - and it came down hard. The nose buried itself in the ground, and the rest of the rocket came apart (it can be re-glued - it didn't actually shatter). Here's what that rocket looks like ( I can't find the first one on the estes site):

All in all, it was great fun - we'll definitely do it again.