A primary school science project sparked a neighbourhood-wide search effort in New Plymouth this week after a homemade bottle rocket vanished from sight before turning up two days later, wedged 7m up a tree more than 120m from the launch pad.
Tony Hutton put out a call on a local Facebook page asking if anyone in the block bounded by Huatoki, Hursthouse, Wicksteed and Carrington streets had spotted the missing rocket, built by his son Rizal as part of an end-of-term science project at Vogeltown School.
"I went there to watch it and I was like, 'we'll be lucky if it gets off the launch pad, it might be 30 metres or something ', and it disappeared," he told 1News.
The rocket's nose cone was fitted with a golf ball — a deliberate design choice to ensure the craft was aerodynamic, he said.
"Golf balls are designed to fly through the air, so we did a bit of a Google on bottle rockets and went, 'yeah, nah, we're sticking one on the nose'."
The launch, caught on video, showed the rocket pause briefly on the pad before spinning up and taking off.
"It behaved exactly like one of those surface-to-air missiles you see launched from submarines in war movies," Hutton said.
"It just sat there, paused, then took off."
Hutton put the rocket's performance down to a couple of deliberate design choices.
Rizal offset the fins slightly to get the rocket spinning for stability, while Hutton's own advice was to skip the decorations.
"I told him, keep it slick, no drag — don't paint it. A lot of the other kids painted and sequinned them all up, which looks cool, but it adds drag."
The Facebook post drew a wave of attention, with commenters joking the rocket had "more airtime miles than any of Elon's rockets" and that Rizal should intern at Rocket Lab, with others claiming it had landed as far away as Perth or British Columbia.
"I was honestly waiting for someone to have a go at us for launching rockets in town, but it was 100% positive. It was a good reminder that community still exists. Everyone was just genuinely invested in it."
The rocket was eventually found on a teacher-only day at the end of term, after Hutton and his son retraced the flight path and knocked on doors along the likely route. A homeowner spotted it lodged in a tree in their yard and helped shake it free.
The project was run using a science kit supplied to the school, and Hutton credited the hands-on nature of the project to getting students interested in physics, saying Rizal was now interested in the sciences.
"It's one thing to read about it or do the maths in a classroom, but when you see it in action, it clicks," he said.
"Watching everyone from the fancy designs to the functional — there was one that blew up on the launchpad and sounded like a shotgun — their interactive learning, I think it makes the difference."
As for the Huttons' next launch, he says the rocket will fly again, though next time they might strap on a tracking device.
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