Project overview
BUDGET
ROCKET: Unlimited
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Total Cost: $1,850,000
The HAB: $5,000,000
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Total spent: $5,000,000
REFLECTION
Overall, our entire time and construction cost was approximately 2 Million dollars in total. In retrospect, this is a reasonable cost range for our project, and we are glad that we did not go over in expenditures.
Given only a limited amount of fundings, we just barely made it. We believe we could have better used our money if we had payed more attention to our intentions for our HAB. We believe our HAB could've been better constructed with money left to spare.
Justification
Emily H.
Our final mission was pretty exceptional. We got the parachute to deploy, and we were lucky enough for our rocket to actually launch. Truthfully, many functions of the rocket seemed doubtful, but our final launch had put those worries to rest. The launch was quick, and I estimated that our rocket reached at least 15 feet within the air, curving slightly at the end, and succeeding in deploying the parachute which saved our “passenger”.
Our work efforts were definitely shown, and our major complication came at the end, where we had to shed around 2 ounces of weight off our model. This practically caused us to take all of our work and throw it in the trash. We ended up switching out the nose cone completely, taking off one of the fins, and some of the cylindrical cardboard cutouts withinside the rocket as well. Other complications that arose during our construction process was the nose cone in its entirety. It was oddly disproportionate, but at the same time there was no way to work around the thing. When we were eventually forced to compromise it for a much shorter and rounder cone, we felt more secure with our design since it held more balance in its look and weight. We were afraid of destroying what we had worked on for so long, and that can sometimes be a hinderance when making the best design choices.
In conclusion, our design of our rocket was mainly focused on protecting our egg, and lacked in areas of propulsion and balance. If we were able to redo this project, focusing more on the aerodynamics rather the egg’s protection would have been improved the rocket's performance, and create a more professional launch. We had the basics, but it could be improved.
Julia Walden
Overall, our group did very well on this project and we had a successful outcome. When we launched the rocket, ours went very high, but not quite as high as some others. The nose cone did pop off and the parachute did open, which was what we were most worried about; however, it took a lot of stressful work and planning in order for that to happen. We had many ideas on how we could build our rocket at first, but eventually we decided on a shape that would use one of each sized tube. Later, we had to change this design many times due to factors like weight, center of pressure, space for the egg, materials available, etc.. Once our final plan was made and we had an accurate center of pressure, the construction process was fairly easy. We all worked on building the rocket and editing the website at different times in order to get everything done.
This project was very stressful for all of my group members because we had to focus on research, building, social media, and our website all at the same time. We worked pretty well together as a team, but sometimes we did not work as hard as we could have. It was hard to agree with the group on how to find a solution; for example, we had trouble working together when we had to reduce the weight of our rocket. In the end, we did get it to 3.0 ounces! This probably helped our rocket a lot in the launch. The estimated guess, through looking at the video and doing rounded math, our rocket went about 30 feet high and our Watney survived!
For this project, my group did well on the research and understanding of Mars and our rocket, but struggled on the website and social media aspect. Some of the members of the group did not focus on this part or think of it as equally important to the rocket. Because of this, we only have 51 views on our website. This is much less than some other groups, even though it felt like we worked so hard to spread our website. If I were to redo this project, I would make sure my group worked hard everyday and did their part on the website and building equally. This would make our rocket even more efficient and probably give us more views on our website. I would keep the design of our rocket the same and everything we did to it, since it was successful.
Justin Lechner
Thinking back after our launch I believe we did a great job with this assignment. We followed all of the rules and gave all the information that we needed to give. In this project we had to use the engendering design process to help us. Our problem was to launch a rocket up to a certain height and then have the egg come back down safely without cracking. We had different ideas in the beginning of how the parachute and the engine will act to help save the egg, these included having a pointed nose cone to dig down into the ground, using a lot of padding, and to have the parachute drift it down. In this project we built the escape capsule and the parachute first so we can test it to make sure our idea could actually work. In this test our egg was safe and didn't crack and our padding with the parachute protected it. With these results we constructed our rocket and inserted our escape pod into it. But the day before the launch our teachers gave us a real life problem, our rocket was too heavy and they also gave us a much smaller egg. With these changes we had to totally change how our rocket worked and distributed weight. This was a challenge to change our 5 ounce rocket to only have 3 ounces. I think our group worked well together but it was difficult to have multiple people working on the rocket at once and also having other people in different science classes made it hard to work on the HAB. Although our rocket was thick all the way through we planned that for a bigger egg. This could have reduced how high our rocket was and also added extra weight that also could have made it go up higher. I think that our rocket was one of the few that actually got up to a decent height and also had our egg survive the fall with the assistance of our parachute. Knowing I feel that our design was well thought out and had good practicality to completing the mission.
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