Fly Me to the Moon

This is the Mercury rocket I built for our grandson, Ayden. He doesn't have it yet so don't tell him!

The guitar shows the scale. It's 6 feet tall. It's made out of stuff from Home Depot. The body is 8" air conditioning duct, the capsule is a duct reducer, the fins are carved out of wood, the nose cone is a basement drainage screen-cap-thingy, and my favorite, an empty caulking tube (the red tower) is supported by dowel rods. The blast deflector that you can't see on the bottom of the engine is some air-vent doo-hickey that has really cool tabs that I bent to make it look like a nozzle. It took like 45 trips to Home Depot to figure what to use. The people there were always very helpful and asked if they could help me. What could I tell them? I'm building a Mercury Rocket. No. I just thanked them and cryptically replied, "Uh, no thanks, you wouldn't believe me if I told you what I was doing anyway." Now that I think about it, they probably went home at night and watched the news waiting to hear about some serial killer that built a weird contraption strictly from Home Depot parts. Never thought about that. Oops. Wasn't me. Just a rocket.

And now that it's done, I'm not sure how to get a 6 foot rocket in a 4 foot Kia. Hmmmmmmm.

Idea, I'll strap it to the top of the Kia and Sue and I can wear space helmets and pretend we're floating in space while we're driving. We can hang some Tang bottles from fishing line too, soundtrack to 2001 blaring on the CD player. Cool.

Now if I can just figure out how to get it on my daughter's Air Force Base without getting arrested for possession of an unlicensed thruster and orbiter...