I’m supposed to write a paper on the differential equation governing rocket flight. I’m supposed to get at least three sources for this paper, including the equation itself and whatever background information I can find. Unfortunately, I can come up with no obvious sources for such information. My DE prof has some, but he’s out of town at the mo, so I thought I’d post here and see if the collective wisdom of the SD boards could help me out. 
Thanks!
Friday, I was a judge at the Texas state science fair for high schools and middle schools. One of the projects I judged was by two kids who did some rocketry, and they predicted the altitude that a rocket reached by something called the Euler equation.
Hope this helps…
Well, it’s really not too bad. I don’t remember the details, but it’s just Newton’s Law: F = dp / dt, where p = mv, v = dx/dt, and of course, the rocket’s mass will be time dependent. What form you choose for F will depend, of course, on whether the rocket is in a gravitational field or not.