Make: Rockets

Chapter 21. Air Rocket Glider

The Daedalus Air Rocket Glider

Figure 21-1. Daedalus takes off vertically from an air rocket launcher with its wings folded. At apogee, the wings deploy, and the aircraft returns as a glider.

An airplane uses the lift of the wing or the tilt of the horizontal stabilizer to cause the plane to pitch up at high speed so it recovers from a dive. That doesn’t work well for a rocket, which would generate enough speed for the aircraft to spiral around in loops! Icarus, from Chapter 20, solves this problem by moving the motor well ahead of the wings and tail surface.

There is another way to prevent the rocket glider from looping ...