How much energy does it take to get into space? | NumberHub with Timandra Harkness | Head Squeeze
568Find out how much energy it takes to get into space with Timandra in this space week NumberHub special. Apparently it's all down to the size of your rocket.
To get ourselves into space, we have to first of all contend with gravity. Thanks to Isaac Newton, it's easy to work out the force of gravity which we are dealing with by taking into account the masses of the two objects exerting a gravitational pull on each other and the square of their distance. In the case of jetting into space, the two objects would be the person to take flight and the Earth itself.
If we are talking about getting to the moon however, then we only need to get as far away from Earth as it takes to enter the moon's gravitational pull. We can then let moon gravity do its work and complete our journey. This is about 9/10th of the distance there, as the moon is a lot smaller than the Earth, so exerts much less gravitational pull.
In order to get 9/10ths of the way to the moon a person would need to be fired at 11,168 m/s from the Earth. Simple enough, however if this was done the person would simply burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, even if they were inside a spaceship.
The solution therefore would be to accelerate to this speed; cue a space ship with large rockets behind you.
Another trick to get a little more velocity for free is to launch from the Earth's equator, towards the East, getting boost of around 1,700 km/h to your initial speed.
Of course a bigger rocket and more fuel means that you need more energy to get into space. However as the fuel is used up, that's less to be lifted up by the remainder. So we are dealing with an ever changing situation. Newton comes to the rescue once again, this time with calculus.
The formula to work out how much energy we need is - we take the initial weight of a fuel leaden spacecraft and divide it by the final weight of the ship without fuel. The natural logarithm of that is then multiplied by the effective exhaust velocity of the craft. We then get the velocity change.
So the answer to how much energy does it require to get into space is - 'it depends on your rocket'.
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Talking of using up energy find out what happened with Head Squeeze pushed Greg Foot's body to the max http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l8M5P__Qd8
And how much energy is in an Easter egg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmwP4fX1MM4&list=PLMrtJn-MOYmdbPmMYmArKa-LPIQmeicJB&index=20
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