Water Rockets

Back in high school, I spent a lot of time designing and building water rockets for my school's Science Olympiad team. Although I'm no longer active in rocketry, I've left this page up to share a lot of the information I learned.

Bottle Rocket Handbook (670KB PDF)
A guide to designing water rockets. It includes a combination of theory and practical construction tips. (Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader)

Bottle Rocket Simulator (516KB ZIP)
A simulator for water rockets written in Visual C++. Implements the algorithms described in the Bottle Rocket Handbook. (Requires the MFC DLLs, which are not included in the ZIP file. If you receive an error because of a missing DLL, download it from Microsoft's web site.)

Elliptical Parachute Calculator (36KB ZIP)
Designs patterns for elliptical parachutes, using the algorithm described in the Bottle Rocket Handbook. Written in Visual Basic. (Requires the VB Runtime DLLs, which can be downloaded from Microsoft's web site.)

Media Gallery
Various photos and videos from some of our rocket launches.