Comment on Honda successfully launched and landed its own reusable rocket
ch00f@lemmy.world 6 days agoThe issue is not going up, it’s going over. If we only cared about the private sector getting people into space, that happened on a fully reusable vehicle twenty years ago.
The problem is getting things to stay in space. Not trying to Elon-stan here, but getting a rocket into orbit is many fold more difficult than just getting into space.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 5 days ago
Yeah, if by “going over”, you mean accelerating in the horizontal direction, then you’re right.
Just to illustrate this: Consider we want to put 1 kg of mass into orbit.
First, we have to raise it by 100 km. That requires 1e6 J = 1 MJ of energy (formula is mgh).
Then, we have to accelerate it sideways, to a speed of 8 km/s. The energy to do that is 32 MJ (formula is ½mv²).