Water rocketry is no solitary pursuit. Launching them always draws a crowd, and a quick search on the internet reveals zillions of home-spun sites from every continent. Here are some great links that I came across, and specifically why I liked them. Please feel free to recommend other sites to me.
Back in 2008 the PBS home improvement program Ask This Old House teamed up with sciencetoymaker.org to make an overhead water rocket on their annual kids program.
I also used my 8 minutes of fame to document how the talent, camera person, director, grip, production coordinator and producer work together as a team to create an Ask This Old House segment.
- The origin of water rocket made from a soda bottle is the Mother Earth News back in 1983.
- Amazing high speed video (slowed down) of water rocket launches! Elsewhere on the site, great tips for getting useful video of launches, quirky ideas like putting a water balloon inside the bottle and some thrust curve math.
- The Water Rocket Explorer site shows what happens when an engineer and his sons encounter water rockets. Not only is there is lots of practical information for building simple to complex (parachute) rockets, but also fascinating tangential stuff like the section on rockets reaching escape velocity from the Earth. Truly inspired and high quality. And don't miss the research page which has slow-motion video clips, pressure/volume curves and links to useful data.
- This is Ian Clark's water rocket site. Ian is the one who came up with idea of using cable ties to make a release mechanism.
- This is an Australian website. With Coke can rockets and multiple rockets, they are definitely thinking "outside the box."
- Thanks to Paul Cummings for alerting me to this great NASA site specifically about water rocket. It's in 3 parts: Propulsion, stability and drag.
- The Wikipedia "water rocket" entry is very interesting.