Facepalm.
In the last few minutes, over a dozen K-Nex rockets have lifted off and exploded shortly after takeoff.
Sigh.
Not the best introduction to the second Space Age for them.... ah well, we'll try again later.
At least nobody was aboard.
On my 12th birthday, I watched the Challenger explosion happen right in front of my eyes. Me and the rest of the kids from Indian Harbour Beach watched the pieces of the shuttle slowly fall out of the sky. Some speculated that one of the pieces was an escape pod, but one of the kids whose dad worked on the shuttle said there wasn't an escape pod. We just couldn't believe it. It didn't seem possible that with all that focused attention on getting those 7 astronauts safely into space that such a thing could happen.
It was not the best experience for a kid who loved space and science.
However, it didn't turn me off from it, far from it. I ended up going to college for Aeronautical Engineering, before switching to Physics. I ended up as a nuclear physicist and doing a nuclear fusion startup. I still live within sight of the VAB.
If you want your kids to be interested in science, its more important that they be exposed to rockets, science, etc. than that they see it always be successful. Just showing them that it's cool goes a long way. But its much easier if you don't have to mix in questions about life and death, especially at such young ages.
"The crew cabin, made of reinforced aluminum, was a particularly robust section of the shuttle. During vehicle breakup, it detached in one piece and slowly tumbled into a ballistic arc. NASA estimated the load factor at separation to be between 12 and 20 g; within two seconds it had already dropped to below 4 g and within ten seconds the cabin was in free fall. The forces involved at this stage were likely insufficient to cause major injury."
So, in a way there was a pod...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
The shuttle wasn't intact, just the crew cabin, or the very front part.
(Protip: Only put the humans in the safer rockets, and be sure that they are going to so something useful up there, and anyway explain them that this is dangerous.)
Probably in 20, 50 or 100 years this will be as safe as current planes, but today it's a dangerous task.
This does highlight the difficulty of manufacturing a complex system in small quantities without the opportunity to do an end to end test before use.
They're using cutting edge stuff here and there, e.g. friction stir welding, which is a good match for the long seams in boosters, but mostly its organizational, and clean slate, not starting with a military rocket which is developed for and under different constraints. Or explicitly (Apollo) or implicitly (Space Shuttle and beyond) as a public works project, where cost is secondary to employing a lot of people.
You have no idea what parts of it are or are not cutting edge. I guarantee you many of the parts and pieces in the rocket required pushing boundaries. All the little bits of material science, modern computational analysis, and advanced manufacturing techniques are cutting edge.