Life’s Little Lessons

Seb's rocket

See that terrible cellphone photo up there? That’s Seb’s rocket. The Viking. We made it together. It was fun. It looked pretty decent, even though I painted it. We should have launched it (and Oren’s new rocket) yesterday, but baseball practice at our launch site stymied those plans. I had mostly written off launching today, due to stiff breezes, but the clouds parted late this afternoon, so we went for it. I took a long look at the flags above the field, noted the wind direction, and set up the launch site appropriately. We wait for a break in the wind.

Countdown.

Launch.

Rocket goes very, very high. (And this was an A-level engine, too.)

Wind picks up. Rocket begins to drift very, very far. Over the fence of the field, but not quite over the trees on the hillside dropping down the zoo. It comes to rest high up in a tree.

I scurry over the fence and down the hill. Seb tells me I should climb up the tree (which is pretty much dead), and if I don’t want to do that, I should run home and get our axe and chop it down. I try chucking a few baseballs (the hillside is littered with them), but the rocket is tangled in a mess of branches (my poor aim is likely also a contributing factor in the failure). None of the branches on the hillside are quite long enough to reach, so we resign ourselves to leaving it there, hoping the wind might take it down. Tomorrow, I may try to connect a few paint poles together and try another recovery, assuming it doesn’t rain overnight.

Today’s lesson: launching rockets with 15-20 MPH winds is generally a bad idea.