To Saturn or BUST!

After learning about the planet Saturn and the rocket named Cassini that was sent there to obtain pictures, we used the book's suggestion and decided to create our own rocket demonstration. A few household items.
A little "lipstick and rouge"....
Mixing the "explosive chemicals"......
and BUST--complete failure. We attempted several other containers and tried tampering with the amount of Alka-selzer, but we could not get it to work. (Sigh).
However, Bubbles had just picked this book out from the library, on an unrelated note, but it had an activity in it that showed how to make a rocket! (A bottle rocket, that is)
Some more household items....
Not quite so pretty......
A make-shift launching pad......
Some air pressure and a beautiful assistant....
Lift-off! You can see the water trail in the air, but that baby is way, way, way out! ;)

We had so much fun doing this, that Bubbles has decided to take this activity and turn it into her Science Fair project. She will be experimenting with the ratio of water to air per container in order to determine distance launched. Perfect, since she just finished learning about ratios and proportions in Math.