Whee! Bang!

[stuck]

Oooo! Ahhh!

At our local display last night.

Ken

[HansV]

Ah! Guy Fawkes Day!

[jstevens]

At first glance it looked like a Nebula.

[stuck]

I think I can see a dragon, top left, and underneath it there seems to be a face with a big bushy beard.

Ken

[stuck]

Here's another firework.

Ken

[GeoffW]

We used to have Guy Fawkes Day when we were kids, but it's not celebrated any more. Partially, it was dangerous - we used to let off fireworks in our own yards, and every year, lots of people were injured. But partially it was a "celebration" of anti Catholicism.

[StuartR]

I stopped participating in "Guy Fawkes" celebrations for the same reasons as Geoff

[GeoffW]

To clarify - "We" means Australia. It's no longer a thing in Australia, though I completely agree with its removal. Fireworks sales to the public have been banned since the 1970s, and nobody, to my knowledge, observes the occasion any more.

Instead, professional fireworks displays for the New Year have grown in importance and in scale. Those little rockets we let off back in those days wouldn't rate at all now.

[LisaGreen]

Tangent..

Anyone know how high firework rockets typically explode at and more specifically what g is there?

Wondering how many rockets to put something in orbit.. ie 100 miles high.

Lisa

[PJ_in_FL]

Tangent..

Anyone know how high firework rockets typically explode at and more specifically what g is there?

Wondering how many rockets to put something in orbit.. ie 100 miles high.

Lisa

IMHO, a back of the napkin estimate: INFINITE.

The problem is it would take many stages of fireworks rockets to get a 1 kg mass into orbit. Adding stages adds mass that has to be raised, which adds the number of fireworks needed to lift that stage and all the rest in succession. Gunpowder fireworks have very low specific impulse, so the number of fireworks needed to lift the stage itself soon becomes too great and increases geometrically as stages are added. Maybe there's a number less than infinite, but it'll be a very large number.

[stuck]

...Wondering how many rockets to put something in orbit...

I was going to say, "One if it was big enough", but according to this Wikipedia article:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit
no one has managed to do that yet:

A single-stage-to-orbit (or SSTO) vehicle... ...To date, no Earth-launched SSTO launch vehicles have ever been flown; orbital launches from Earth have been performed by either fully or partially expendable multi-stage rockets

So the answer must be at least two.

Back at fireworks though, a simple software bug:
    https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-ariane-5-disaster
turned the maiden flight of the Ariane 5 rocket into a very big and very expensive firework:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK_yguLapgA

Ken