Today was Alex's rocket launch day. He's been pretty stressed about it for a few days, but it went ok in the end. For his middle school science class, they've been learning about rockets and this project was for them to build one out of a 2-liter bottle. They fill it about halfway with water, add some pressurized air, and foosh. But the kicker is they have an egg in the rocket that they have to recover safely. So Alex did all the design work and I helped with the build. We made a cool looking rocket out of two bottles, one smaller, so it looked kind of like a two-stage rocket. Foamboard fins and nose cone, trash bag parachute, urethane foam egg container, decorated with duct tape, and named "Inertia Mk II." The upper stage and nose cone was supposed to detach and expel the egg which then parachuted to the ground safely. Well, his rocket SAILED maybe the highest in the class, or at least one of, but my guess is the upper stage got jammed together with the lower stage during acceleration, so it never came off and the whole thing plummeted like an arrow. It fell a long way. And the egg did not survive. But, even though nothing slowed it down on the descent, he had a really good aloft time. He lost a few points for a dead egg but still got an A- for the build and flight. Even with the egg loss, it was impressive. I wish I'd had a launch pad that we could do test flights with, maybe we could have made some tweaks to improve it. It worked fine when I threw it up by hand in the backyard.