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Hydroaeropropulsion Rocket Research Labs

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27 august 2002

You can see that we used the cutter knife to shorten the cork. This is because the metal L-pieces are not very high, so there is not much room below them to fit everything. Bigger L-pieces would solve that problem, of course.

Very handy: the launcher plank has a metal ring with a hole in it, which can be used to push the cork easily into the bottle.

Ready for launch. We launched this 1.5 liter bottle two times successfully.

Experiment: a small bottle with four fins (half playing cards) taped to them.

Result: four fins taped to the plastic wrapping ... They let loose almost immediately after the launch, probably due to the sudden acceleration of the bottle. The bottle itself flew very fine though.

A small piece of plastic wrapping was found at the platform.

Afterwards, two more successful launches of the 1.5 liter bottle. Water only started leaking slightly out of the cork from 3 bar, and we could not get the pressure significantly above 4 bar because at that point any excess pressure would be undone by leaking. So we need a better sealing mechanism that withholds higher pressures.