So, if you research the history of space exploration, you’ll find one result keeps happening over and over and over and over.
They keep exploding.
It’s not surprising. Their basic foundation is that they are rockets. Even from their original designs, rockets have always been built with the purpose of exploding. They’re weapons. But, before they were weapons, the ORIGINAL idea, was to use the propulsion to exit Earths atmosphere and into space. The only problem is that when this was being designed, I forget the guys name, but he was a scientist that the nazis had captured. He designed the rockets for space craft. Hitler then took the designs and thought “Let’s blow up London!”
So, once the war was over, the United States came over, and recruited him into NASA. His designs were how NASA got started. Modified versions of his original designs are what Apollo 11 used to get to the moon. So, the design CAN work. However, there were 10 Apollo missions before that didn’t reach the moon. The first one ended disastrously.
The Challenger shuttle ended in disaster.
Even though they aren’t NASA, recently in the past month Elon Musk’s SpaceX had an explosion. Jeff Bezos also had a rocket explode. So this is still an issue.
And I always wondered, what would happen if you just took a commercial jet, and flew above the clouds? Well, they DO fly above the clouds. So what would happen if you just kept going “up”?
And I’m sure you can’t just grab a stock Delta Airlines 747 and fly into orbit, but why not design a space craft, which more resembles the take-off of an airplane? Drives forward really fast, and then lifts? Except it’s not flying NYC to LA. It just keeps lifting and lifting, until it’s in orbit.
You could put thrusters on it to go forward in space. And then for landings, you wouldn’t drop off into the ocean. You’d just land at an airport. The crazy thing is, the people of NASA are so talented, that they could route the whole thing, in a way that they land at whichever airport they want. So they’d know ahead of time NOT to schedule any landings or takeoffs for this 3 hour period of time when the space craft lands.
And I bet with enough time, they could get the experience to reduce that 3 hours, into 15 minutes. Knowing exactly when they’ll arrive. Also no more of this breakaway pods that fall back to earth after detatching, or the other ones which just float out in space forever.
But I’m sure I can’t be the only one with this idea, so I figure the most likely is that it’s a scientific restriction. Where they can’t do it, because…and this is where the explanation would be.
Anyone know the explanation?
I’m only adding to the already well established answers here, but spacecraft also need to further away from the earth’s gravity well which requires a huge amount of energy. If you’re lifting 100 tons (if you’re including some kind of aeroplane + spacecraft), we are talking at least something like 100+ gigajoules of energy to get it into space in the first place, excluding orbital velocity. So the immense energy capacity of rocket fuel tends to be the only one sufficient for this, plus as the fuel tanks empty and the drag decreases, the acceleration of the rocket dramatically increases.
A lot of this makes complete sense why rockets are the only viable solution for the time being.
The only caveat here is that anything in orbit is nowhere near escaping the gravity well. The earth is pulling on the International Space Station at about 90% of the force as at sea level. It’s just that everything is going so fast it misses the ground.
Yeah I never said they escape the gravity well, only that they need to get further out to even start orbiting and it’s pretty strong even during the first 2000km out.