Rocketry Planet

WARSAW, New York USA — Seventh-grader Rachael Grieg watches intently during Monday's countdown at the Maple Street baseball fields.

An electronic tone sounds just before she pushes the ignition switch, lofting her rocket skyward amid a trail of sulfurous smoke. Then comes the "pop!" of the rocket's locator charge, the puff of white smoke making it visible once more, against the clear blue sky.

Seventh graders watch as teacher Tim Suleski places a homemade rocket on a launch pad Monday at Warsaw Central School. The students build and launch homemade rockets for a series of lessons involving math, science, technology, English and history. Photo: Matt Surtel.

It's a perfect shot, and a simultaneous lesson in technology, physics, mathematics English and history.

About 70 middle schoolers participated in this year's interdisciplinary project at Warsaw Central School — the annual event in which students build their own, homemade rockets and reap the lessons therein. While some students were launching, their classmates were busy calculating flight angles and recording data for later.

"Dude, that was awesome!" yelled one seventh-grader one rocket whooshed into the sky.

"We talk about flight, so we talk about aerodynamics," said technology teacher Tim Suleski. "We build them from scratch so they're not model rockets ... We go into action-reaction and Newton's third law."

The rockets are made from the simplest possible construction. They're essentially shipping tape rolled into tubes, with cork nose cones and balsa fins.

It's up to the seventh-graders to shape the nose cone, and install the fins properly Anything that deviates can result in a bad launch.

The engines are the only part not made by the students. They use a solid fuel similar to gunpowder, hence the rotten egg smell after launching.

Most of the rockets leapt skyward with no problem, but a very few showed problems. One made a sharp turn about 20 feet from the launch pad, and flew in a tight ballistic arc, before thudding into the softball field a second later.

"This whole rocket's just messed up," announced seventh-grader Kenny Foster, who ran to retrieve it with friends. "The fins aren't even even."

"(The builder) put the fins upside down," Suleski explained later. "I try to explain to them. We talk with (the students) about the grain direction — to put the fins with the grain."

The upside-down fins probably created bad aerodynamics on the flawed rocket, he said.

Beyond the rocket launches, students will use the results to create charts and graphs about their relative flight performance, such as altitude, angle and flight speeds.

The students are also watching the movie "October Skies" and writing a report, along with studying the Apollo moon voyages, and the studies of rocket pioneer Robert Goddard.

Rachel, 12, said she took three or four weeks building her rocket, which had one of the best flights in her group. She'd expected it would do well.

"It was good," she said.

Copyright © 2009, The Daily News.