Where we discuss everything to do with rockets!
Before we talk about how much fuel it will take to actually get to orbit the planet, we should talk about what an orbit really is. Hopefully, this post will help you understand the basics of orbits! First and foremost, it must be stated that there is gravity in space. Gravity falls off relatively quickly, […]
Read More Getting to Space: What is an Orbit?In the last few posts, we have been talking about ballistic motion and ballistic missiles. In each of these posts, we neglected atmospheric drag. Drag has been covered in the blog before, in terms of terminal velocity and determining how much fuel an airplane uses, but haven’t really covered why drag is important for missiles […]
Read More Getting to Space: Atmospheric DragIn the previous posts, we talked about ballistic motion in which the initial velocity was set. This is not really realistic, since we don’t really shoot things into the air at super fast speeds if we want them to get to space. We also talked about thrust, and how thrust is a combination of the […]
Read More Getting to Space: Ballistic Missiles and the V2 RocketIn the last post, ballistic motion was discussed in terms of giving an object an initial velocity and then only having gravity act as a force on it. This is not really how rockets work, since they start with zero velocity and have to accelerate up to speed to get to the altitude that they […]
Read More Getting to Space: It’s All About the ThrustThe National Science Foundation has a great program where they fund universities to build small satellites, called CubeSats. I got one of these grants many years ago, and we built one. It was called CADRE, and was aimed at measuring the density, temperature and winds in the upper atmosphere. CADRE was a very good project […]
Read More Trying to Figure Out What Happened to My SatelliteIn order to orbit the planet, you need to do two things: (1) get above the atmosphere, and (2) get going very fast in a direction parallel to the Earth’s surface. This is a rather complicated procedure, so I will do it in several parts. In this first part, we will talk about ballistic motion. […]
Read More Getting To Space: Ballistic MotionThe biggest problem with rockets is the fact that they have to carry all their fuel into space with them. One of the reasons that rockets like the Pegasus and SpaceShipOne are so interesting is because they are carried up about 50,000 feet (~15 km) into the air with an airplane, are dropped, and then […]
Read More If we want to get to Mars, we have to change the game – part 1There are now well over 20,000 objects larger than a softball in orbit around the Earth. We are poised to get even more objects, as several companies are planning on launching mega-constellations of satellites (750-4,000) to provide internet across the world from low-Earth orbiting platforms. While space appears to be quite empty, there are a […]
Read More Predicting Orbital CollisionsGetting to another planet, or getting to the sun involves getting out of Earth’s gravity well. Essentially, Earth’s gravity extends outwards forever. If Earth were all alone in the universe, its gravity would be felt everywhere. If anything were sitting out in space and not moving at all with respect to Earth, it would feel […]
Read More Escape VelocityThis is going to be the first in a series on issues surrounding colonizing Mars. I will talk about why it is so incredibly difficult to actually get there and get back as well as some ideas on how we should realistically be looking at minimizing the costs to do this. Ever since the 1960s, […]
Read More How to Get to Mars
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