Mairlyn's PHotos - Nov 24 2025 - Rocket Launching

 

Is rocket building still popular?  I don’t remember building rockets in science class, but maybe rocket clubs came along after public school.  They would have been available to boys in the 1960s.   Today there are lots of toy rockets by Estes.  Beginner rockets are ones you easily assemble, they are colourful and ready-to-fly. They cost under $20 to over $150 for a Blast-Off Birthday party pack.  I guess there are 12 packs because once you start, you probably want to launch a few. The age group for stomp rockets is 6 and older.  The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an instruction set for rocket launching.  The paper rocket instructions, the Stomp rocket launcher (a PVC-pipe launcher which is teacher-built), altitude tracker, and data sheets, clipboards, a long measuring tape, and so on. Are you interested in the stomp rocket launcher?  It includes 2-litre soda bottles and duct tape. As the name suggests, students stomp on the body of the bottle to launch the rocket.  The NASA instructions include placing a basketball in the landing zone and have the students imagine that the ball is Mars.  Here’s the full set of instructions HERE.  It says that stomp rockets can launch quite high, up to 200 feet.  It seems to me that the altitude tracking methods are the most complicated part of the activity, having to use a protractor for the manual calculations. This is the simplest form of amateur rocketry. One can move on rocket motors and fuels, and on to significant sizes.  We’re coming up to Christmas train season.  This one is at Allan Gardens in Toronto.

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When is it not rocket surgery?

What is the rocket science news of 2018?  The expression "It isn't rocket science" made its way into our lives in the 20th century. Supposedly this expression came about in the 1980s with football reporting. "Coaching football is not rocket science and it's not brain surgery.  It's a game, nothing more."  Prior to the 1980s brain surgery was the occupation that simple tasks were said not to be.  Before that it was 'as easy as pie' or 'as easy as falling off a log'. Did you know that George Bush mixed things up and said "it's not rocket surgery". So back to rocket science itself:  the world's most powerful rocket launched on February 6th 2018.  Its name was Flacon Heavy, and it went up fine, but it seems that it didn't land successfully - something happened to the core rocket booster.  SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is estimated to cost $90m per launch; Nasa’s planned SLS rocket, a comparable system, is expected to cost about $1bn per flight.   The picture of Elon Musk's dummy astronaut orbiting Earth in a Tesla is stunning to me.  You can see the time-lapse HERE.   On the dashboard is the sign DON'T PANIC - a humorous moment if you remember the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  People want to know if we will  get more snow in March.  It's not rocket science to figure that one out.  Here's Baxter looking at you.