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How Do We Launch Things Into Space?

Illustration of a cartoon robot, the mascot of NASA Space Place.

Watch this video about how we launch things into space! Click here to download this video (1920x1080, 48 MB, video/mp4).

We launch satellites and spacecraft into space by putting them on rockets carrying tons of propellants. The propellants give the rocket enough energy to boost away from Earth’s surface. Because of the pull of Earth’s gravity, largest, heaviest spacecraft need the biggest rockets and the most propellent.

Image of the GRACE Follow-On spacecraft launching into orbit in May 2018.

The GRACE Follow-On spacecraft launched into orbit in May 2018. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

How does a rocket lift off?

More than 300 years ago, a scientist named Isaac Newton laid out three basic laws that describe the way things move. One of the laws says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is the most important idea behind how rockets work.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

If you see pictures or videos of a launch, you’ll see exhaust streaming out the bottom of the rocket. Exhaust is the flames, hot gases and smoke that come from burning the rocket’s propellants.

The exhaust pushes out of a rocket’s engine down toward the ground. That’s the action force . In response, the rocket begins moving in the opposite direction, lifting off the ground. That’s the reaction force .

Once a rocket launches, will it keep going?

It’s not that simple. Earth’s gravity is still pulling down on the rocket. When a rocket burns propellants and pushes out exhaust, that creates an upward force called thrust . To launch, the rocket needs enough propellants so that the thrust pushing the rocket up is greater than the force of gravity pulling the rocket down.

A rocket needs to speed up to at least 17,800 miles per hour—and fly above most of the atmosphere, in a curved path around Earth. This ensures that it won’t be pulled back down to the ground. But what happens next is different, depending on where you want to go.

How to Orbit Earth:

Let’s say you want to launch a satellite that orbits Earth. The rocket will launch, and when it gets to a specific distance from Earth, it will release the satellite.

The satellite stays in orbit because it still has momentum—energy it picked up from the rocket—pulling it in one direction. Earth’s gravity pulls it in another direction. This balance between gravity and momentum keeps the satellite orbiting around Earth.

Satellites that orbit close to Earth feel a stronger tug of Earth’s gravity. To stay in orbit, they must travel faster than a satellite orbiting farther away.

The International Space Station orbits about 250 miles above the Earth and travels at a speed of about 17,150 miles per hour. Compare that to the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, which help us get information to and from other NASA missions. These satellites orbit at a height of more than 22,000 miles and travel much slower—about 6,700 miles per hour—to maintain their high orbit.

How to Get to Other Planets:

If you’re trying to get to another planet, you’ll need a fast-moving rocket to overcome Earth’s gravity. To do that, you’d have to speed up to around 25,000 mph. But you’ll also need to figure out the best time to leave Earth to get to that planet.

For example, Mars and Earth reach their closest distance to each other about every two years. This is the best time to go to Mars, since it requires the least amount of propellant and time to get there. But you’ll still need to launch your rocket at the right time to make sure the spacecraft and Mars arrive at the same place at the same time.

Check out this video if you want to learn more about how to get to Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

You’ll also have to carefully plan your travels if you want to travel to the outer solar system. For instance, if you’re sending spacecraft to study Saturn, do you want to encounter Mars and Jupiter on the way there?

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The Most Powerful Rocket in History Had a Good Morning

SpaceX’s latest Starship mission flew farther than before—and tested technology that could elevate humankind’s spacefaring status.

A pair of onlookers gaze at SpaceX's Starship system, which stands upright on its launchpad on the coast of South Texas.

Listen to this article

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

SpaceX has once again launched the most powerful rocket in history into the sky, and this time, the mission seems to have passed most of its key milestones. Starship took off without a hitch this morning, separated from its booster, and cruised through space for a while before SpaceX lost contact with it. Instead of splashing down in the ocean as planned, Starship seems to have been destroyed during reentry in Earth’s atmosphere.

The flight was the third try in an ambitious testing campaign that began less than a year ago. The other attempts started with beautiful liftoffs, but they stopped short of completing test objectives and ended in explosions . For today’s test, SpaceX changed up its designs and applied them to freshly made Starship prototypes, which are manufactured at a pace that, compared with the rest of rocket history, evokes chocolates coming down the conveyor belt toward Lucille Ball. During today’s test, the spacecraft even managed to conduct a crucial test, transferring rocket propellant from one tank into another while traveling at thousands of miles above Earth’s surface.

All eyes in the spaceflight community are on Starship right now, because the giant rocket-and-spaceship system has an important job to do in just a couple of years: land American astronauts on the moon on NASA’s behalf, bringing humans back to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. The partnership will involve maneuvers that NASA never tried during the Apollo program: The space agency will launch its astronauts off the ground and take them in a capsule toward the moon, but once they arrive in lunar orbit, a Starship will greet them and transport them down to the surface. And for that Starship to reach lunar orbit, SpaceX must launch a bunch of other Starships to refuel the spaceship for the journey—hence the importance of the fuel transfer. In other words, SpaceX is trying to create a gas station in space, circling Earth at the same dizzying speeds as space stations and satellites.

This floating infrastructure is unlike anything humans have attempted to do in space, and it will elevate our spacefaring capacity far beyond anything that was previously possible. The ability to refuel ships in space would crack open the solar system for us, making it easier for astronauts to reach not only the moon but also Mars and even planets deeper into the solar system. It would mean that spacecraft could utilize payload capacity that would have been reserved for enormous amounts of propellant. This decade may see several triumphant lunar landings, but the gas stations will cement our status as an advanced spacefaring species.

The details of the gas-station plan are still concepts on paper, but the ambitious idea goes like this: SpaceX will launch a number of Starships loaded with propellant, a combination of liquid methane and liquid oxygen, into orbit around Earth. These “tankers,” as the company calls them, will deposit fuel into a larger depot, also launched by SpaceX. By the time the Starship carrying NASA’s astronauts reaches orbit, it will have used up most of its fuel. The ship will dock with the gas depot, fuel up, and head off toward the moon.

This future depends on nailing a single, basic fuel transfer, as SpaceX seems to have done today; engineers will have to review data to see how well they did. The process might be simple on Earth, but outer space is an environment perfect for ruining rocket fuel. Liquid methane and oxygen must be kept at cryogenic temperatures, but temperatures in space can swing between extreme cold and heat. If the fuel gets too warm, it might evaporate into a gas and float off.

SpaceX must also launch many more Starships without incident before a moon landing can move forward. The company’s contract with NASA calls for deploying multiple tankers in quick succession to support astronauts heading to the surface. Elon Musk posted on X this week that he hopes to launch Starship at least six times in 2024. More launch attempts would provide NASA with a much clearer sense of its timeline for the first moon landing of the Artemis program, named for Apollo’s sister in Greek mythology. The mission has already been delayed: In January, the agency pushed it from late 2025 to late 2026. Officials said that the schedule change “acknowledges the very real development challenges that have been experienced by our industry partners,” which include SpaceX as well as Lockheed Martin, the aerospace contractor responsible for the capsule that will carry astronauts to lunar orbit.

More than half a century since humans set foot on the moon, Earth is sprinkled with launchpads, formidable signs of our space-explorer status. We’re in the busiest decade of moon exploration since the 1960s, with government agencies and private companies alike deploying robotic missions to the lunar surface. Local space fans refer to the state highway that leads to SpaceX’s base in South Texas, where the latest Starship prototype launched from today, as the “ highway to Mars .” A 21st-century moon landing will be a significant achievement, and a landing on Mars would mark an entirely new era of humanity’s presence in space. But it’ll be the gas stations helping take astronauts there that will truly brand us as an off-world species.

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The base (first, S-IC stage) of a Saturn V rocket showing five red engines.

Space rockets

by Chris Woodford . Last updated: September 28, 2023.

Photo: Looking up at the base of a Saturn V rocket like the ones that put astronauts on the Moon in the 1960s. The five red things are the five engines of the lowest rocket stage (technically called S-IC). Picture courtesy of NASA .

Photo: Space as we know it. Photo of stellar swarm M80 (NGC 6093), a dense star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and courtesy of NASA on the Commons .

Where does space start?

What is space like, is there more than one kind of space, how do rockets work.

The Atlas-Centaur, AC-69, launched the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite (CRRES) in orbit on July 25, 1990.

Photo: An Atlas Centaur rocket launches a scientific satellite in 1990. Picture courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC) .

Photo: Action and reaction: rockets work by firing jets of hot gas downward (the action), which makes them move upward (the reaction). The gas isn't pushing against anything to make the rocket move: the very act of the gas shooting back moves the rocket forward—and that can happen in "empty" space just as well as inside Earth's atmosphere. This picture shows Space Shuttle mission STS-26 in 1988, when the Shuttle made its brave and confident return to space after the Challenger disaster two years earlier. Photo courtesy of NASA on the Commons .

Thrust and drag

Artwork: Forces acting on a plane (left) and a rocket (right). When a plane flies at steady speed, the forward thrust made by the engines is equal to the air resistance (drag) pulling back. The upward force of lift created by the wings is equal to the downward force of the plane's weight. In other words, the two pairs of forces are in perfect balance. With a rocket, thrust from the engines pushes upward while weight and drag try to pull it back down. When the rocket accelerates upward, the thrust is greater than the combined lift and drag. The various surfaces of a rocket can also produce lift, just like the wings of a plane, but it acts sideways instead of upwards. Although this sounds confusing, it's easy to see why if you imagine the blue plane rotated through 90 degrees so it's flying straight up like a rocket: the lift would also be pointing sideways.

Escape velocity

Artwork: Little pieces of history: An interesting cutaway showing the main component parts of the now-retired Space Shuttle orbiter. Picture courtesy of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (NASA-MSFC) . Browse the hi-resolution version of this image (via Wikimedia Commons).

Photo: Test firing the Space Shuttle's main engine. Picture courtesy of NASA on the Commons .

Artwork: How a space rocket works—greatly simplified: Unlike airplane jet engines , which take in air as they fly through the sky, space rockets have to carry their own oxygen supplies ( oxidizers ) with them because there is no air in space. Liquid hydrogen (the fuel) from one tank is mixed with liquid oxygen (the oxidizer) from a separate tank using pumps and valves to control the flow. The oxidizer and fuel mix and burn in the combustion chamber, making a hot blast of exhaust gas that propels the rocket. The payload (the cargo—such as a satellite) occupies a relatively small proportion of the rocket's total volume in the nose-cone at the top.

Photo: An Ariane 5 rocket waiting to launch the James Webb Space Telescope . Picture by Chris Gunn courtesy of NASA and Wikimedia Commons .

Key parts of an Ariane rocket

Artwork: The parts of an Ariane 5 rocket. The central rocket comprises two stages: the lower Cryogenic Main Stage (EPC, orange dotted line) and the Cryogenic Upper Stage (ESC-A, gray dotted line). Solid rocket boosters (orange) stand on each side. Inside the central rocket, the main parts are: 1) Detachable fairing to protect payload as the rocket blasts through Earth's atmosphere; 2) Payload consisting of (in this mission) two satellites to be launched; 3) Satellite mounted on top is launched last; 4) Speltra structure allows two satellites to be launched in the same mission; 5) Satellite mounted underneath Speltra is launched first; 6) Small Aestus engine; 7) Liquid oxygen tank; 8) Liquid hydrogen tank; 9) Vulcain main engine.

A closer look at a scientific rocket

Artwork: Early design for a high-altitude rocket camera from US Patent: 1,102,653: Rocket Apparatus by Robert Hutchings Goddard, July 7, 1914, courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office (with some details removed and colors added for ease of explanation).

Photo: The father of modern rocketry, Robert Hutchings Goddard, pictured in November 1925 with one of his inventions , the double-acting rocket engine. Goddard first got the idea of traveling into space as a teenager, after climbing a cherry tree in his family's garden: "I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars..." His many inventions included powering rockets with liquid fuels and constructing rockets with multiple stages—two fundamentally important ideas used in virtually every successful space rocket launched to date. Picture courtesy of NASA on the Commons .

Photo: An early Atlas rocket photographed in 1963. Picture courtesy of NASA on the Commons .

Photo: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket being launched in 2020. Picture courtesy of NASA on the Commons .

Photo: The Space Launch System (SLS) under construction in the vast Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Picture courtesy of NASA Image and Video Library .

If you liked this article...

Find out more, on this website.

  • History of flight
  • Jet engines (airplane engines)
  • Forces and motion

On other websites

  • NASA and European Space Agency : What's the latest news from the world of space exploration?
  • The Space Educators Handbook : A superb collection of educational resources compiled by NASA's Jerry Woodfill.
  • Rockets: A Teacher's Guide with Activities in Science, Mathematics, and Technology : A comprehensive 100-page guide to rocketry for K-12 educators and their students.
  • Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum : A great place to learn how people conquered flight.
  • Space.com : One of the web's most popular space news sites.

For older readers

  • Apollo 11: The Inside Story by David Whitehouse. Icon, 2019. On the 50th anniversay of the Apollo moon landing, this book takes a new look at one of the most inspiring scientific success stories of all time.
  • Rocket: Owners' Workshop Manual: 1942 Onwards by David Baker. Haynes, 2015. Some great cutaways accompanied by lavish photos. This book covers both the general principles of how rockets work and examples of classic rockets from the last half century.
  • Eyewitness: Space Exploration by Carole Stott et al. DK, 2014. What's out there, beyond the sky, in the darkness where we can only imagine? A colorful introduction from Dorling Kindersley.
  • Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin. Penguin, 2010. An engaging read that charts the historic Apollo missions and the men who made them possible.

For younger readers

  • Space Encyclopedia: A Tour of Our Solar System and Beyond by David A. Aguilar et al, National Geographic, 2020. This one's suitable for ages 9–12.
  • Eyewonder: Space by Carole Stott. DK, 2016. A short (56-page) introduction for ages 5–9.
  • Space: Smithsonian by Robert Dinwiddie et al. DK, 2015. An information-packed but visually very engaging introduction for ages 9–12.
  • Fueling up and Heading out by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Natural History Magazine, June, 2005. These two engaging essays explain how a rocket gets off the ground and how it moves around in space once it gets there.

Text copyright © Chris Woodford 2006, 2022. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice and terms of use .

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rocket launch.

Rockets and rocket launches, explained

Get everything you need to know about the rockets that send satellites and more into orbit and beyond.

Since the invention of gunpowder in China more than seven centuries ago, humans have sent cylinders soaring into the skies with the help of controlled explosions. These craft and their engines, called rockets, have taken on many roles as fireworks, signal flares, and weapons of war.

But since the 1950s, rockets also have let us send robots, animals, and people into orbit around Earth —and even beyond.

How do rockets work?

As tempting as the logic may be, rockets don't work by “pushing against the air,” since they also function in the vacuum of space. Instead, rockets take advantage of momentum, or how much power a moving object has.

If no outside forces act on a group of objects, the group's combined momentum must stay constant over time. Imagine yourself standing on a skateboard with a basketball in your hands. If you throw the basketball in one direction, you and the skateboard will roll in the opposite direction to conserve momentum. The faster you throw the ball, the faster you roll backward.

Rockets work by expelling hot exhaust that acts in the same way as the basketball. The exhaust's gas molecules don't weigh much individually, but they exit the rocket's nozzle very fast, giving them a lot of momentum. As a result, the rocket moves in the opposite direction of the exhaust with the same total oomph.

Rockets make exhaust by burning fuel in a rocket engine. Unlike airplanes' jet engines, rockets are designed to work in space: They don't have intakes for air, and they bring along their own oxidizers, substances that play the role of oxygen in burning fuel. A rocket's fuel and oxidizer—called propellants—can be either solid or liquid. The space shuttle's side boosters used solid propellants, while many modern rockets use liquid propellants.

What are the stages of a rocket launch?

Today's large, space-bound rockets consist of at least two stages, sections stacked in a shared cylindrical shell. Each stage has its own engines, which can vary in number. The first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has nine engines, while the first stage of Northrop Grumman's Antares rocket has two.

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A rocket's first stage gets the rocket out of the lower atmosphere, sometimes with the help of extra side boosters. Because the first stage must lift the entire rocket, its cargo (or payload), and any unused fuel, it's the biggest and most powerful section.

The faster a rocket goes, the more air resistance it encounters. But the higher the rocket goes, the thinner the atmosphere gets. Combined, these two factors mean that the stress on a rocket rises and then falls during a launch, peaking at a pressure known as max q. For the SpaceX Falcon 9 and the United Launch Alliance Atlas V , max q occurs at 80 to 90 seconds after liftoff, at altitudes between seven and nine miles .

Once the first stage has done its job, the rocket drops that portion and ignites its second stage. The second stage has a lot less to transport, and it doesn't have to fight through the thick lower atmosphere, so it usually has just one engine. At this point, rockets also let go of their fairings, the pointed cap at the rocket's tip that shields what the rocket is carrying—its payload—during the launch's first phase.

Historically, most of a rocket's discarded parts were left to fall back down to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere. But starting in the 1980s with NASA's space shuttle , engineers designed rocket parts that could be recovered and reused. Private companies including SpaceX and Blue Origin are even building rockets with first stages that return to Earth and land themselves. The more that a rocket's parts can be reused, the cheaper rocket launches can get.

What are the different types of rockets?

Just as automobiles come in many shapes and sizes, rockets vary depending on the jobs they do.

Sounding rockets launch high in the air on ballistic arcs, curving into space for five to 20 minutes before they crash back to Earth. They're most often used for scientific experiments that don't need a lot of time in space. For instance, NASA used a sounding rocket in September 2018 to test parachutes for future Mars missions. ( Where exactly is the edge of the space?The answer is surprisingly complex .)

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Suborbital rockets such as Blue Origin's New Shepard are strong enough to temporarily enter space, either for scientific experiments or space tourism. Orbital-class rockets are powerful enough to launch objects into orbit around Earth. Depending on how big the payload is, they also can send objects beyond Earth, such as scientific probes ( or sports cars ).

Ferrying satellites to orbit or beyond requires serious power. For a satellite to remain in a circular orbit 500 miles above Earth's surface, it must be accelerated to more than 16,600 miles an hour . The Saturn V rocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted more than 300,000 pounds of payload into low-Earth orbit during the Apollo missions.

For now, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy and United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy are the world's most powerful rockets, but even bigger ones are coming. Once NASA's Space Launch System gets past its delays and cost overruns , it will be the most powerful rocket ever built. Meanwhile, SpaceX is building a test version of its Starship, the massive rocket formerly known as the BFR (Big Falcon Rocket). Russia has also announced its goal of launching a “super-heavy lift” rocket in 2028.

As some rocket makers go big, others are going small to service the growing boom in cheap-to-build satellites no bigger than refrigerators . Rocket Labs's Electron rocket can lift just a few hundred pounds into low-Earth orbit, but for the small satellites it's ferrying, that's all the power it needs.

What is a launch pad?

A launch pad is a platform from which a rocket is launched, and they're found at facilities called launch complexes or spaceports. ( Explore a map of the world's active spaceports .)

A typical launch pad consists of a pad and a launch mount, a metal structure that supports the upright rocket before it launches. Umbilical cables from the launch mount provide the rocket with power, cooling liquids, and top-up propellant before launch. The structure also helps shield the rocket from lightning strikes.

Different launch complexes have different ways of putting rockets on launch pads. At NASA's Kennedy Space Center, the space shuttle was assembled vertically and moved to the launch pad on a tank-like vehicle called a crawler. The Russian space program transports its rockets horizontally by train to the launch pad, where they're then lifted upright.

Launch pads also have features that minimize damage from the rocket's launch. When a rocket first ignites, valves lining the launch pad spray hundreds of thousands of gallons of water into the air around the exhaust, which helps lessen the rocket's deafening roar. Trenches beneath the launch pad also direct the rocket's exhaust out and away from the craft, so the flames can't rise back up and engulf the rocket itself.

Where are rockets launched?

There are many launch sites around the world, each with different pros and cons. In general, the closer a launch site is to the Equator, the more efficient it is. That's because the Equator moves faster than Earth's poles as the planet rotates, like the outer edge of a spinning record. Launch sites at higher latitudes more easily place satellites into orbits that pass over the poles.

Between 1957 and 2017, 29 spaceports sent satellites or humans into orbit. Many of the sites are still active, including the only three facilities ever to launch humans into orbit. More spaceports are on the way, both public and private. In 2018, the U.S.-New Zealand firm Rocket Labs launched satellites into orbit from its own private launchpad on New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula.

Where can I see a rocket launch?

In the United States, NASA's Kennedy Space Center regularly offers access to visitors . NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia also allows launch viewing from its visitor center. The European Space Agency's spaceport in French Guiana is open to visitors , but the agency encourages travelers to plan ahead. Tourists can visit Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome, the storied home of the Soviet and Russian space programs, but only by booking a tour. The facility remains closely guarded . ( See pictures of the villages near Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome, where salvaging discarded rockets is a way of life .)

If you can't visit a spaceport in person, never fear: Many public space agencies and private companies offer online livestreams of their launches .

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How SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket might unlock the solar system—and beyond

With the first orbital test launch of Starship on the horizon, scientists are dreaming about what it might make possible— from trips to Neptune to planetary defense.

  • Jonathan O'Callaghan archive page

SpaceX Starship

If all goes to plan, next month SpaceX will launch the largest rocket in human history. Towering nearly 400 feet tall, the rocket – Starship – is designed to take NASA astronauts to the moon. And SpaceX’s CEO, Elon Musk, has bigger ambitions: he wants to use it to  settle humans on Mars .

Much has already been made of Starship’s human spaceflight capabilities. But the rocket could also revolutionize what we know about our neighboring planets and moons. “Starship would totally change the way that we can do solar system exploration,” says Ali Bramson, a planetary scientist from Purdue University. “Planetary science will just explode.”

If it lives up to its billing, scientists are already talking about sending missions to Neptune and its largest moon in the outer solar system, bringing back huge quantities of space rock from Earth’s moon and Mars, and even developing innovative ways to protect Earth from incoming asteroids. 

Starship—which is being built at a Texas site dubbed “Starbase”—consists of a giant spaceship on top of a large booster, known as Super Heavy. Both can land back on Earth so they can be reused, reducing costs. The entire vehicle will be capable of lifting 100 metric tons (220,000 pounds) of cargo and people into space on regular low-cost missions. The volume of usable space within Starship is a whopping 1,000 cubic meters—big enough to fit the  entire Eiffel Tower , disassembled. And that’s got scientists excited.

“Starship is, like, wow,” says James Head, a planetary scientist from Brown University.

In mid-November, speaking in a publicly accessible  virtual meeting  about Starship hosted by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Musk discussed the project’s scientific potential. “It’s extremely important that we try to become a multiplanet species as quickly as possible,” he said. “Along the way, we will learn a great deal about the nature of the universe.” Starship could carry “a lot of scientific instrumentation” on flights, said Musk—far more than is currently possible. “We’d learn a tremendous amount, compared to having to send fairly small vehicles with limited scientific instrumentation, which is what we currently do,” he said.

 “You could get a 100-ton object to the surface of Europa,” said Musk. 

Cheap and reusable

Central to many of these ideas is that Starship is designed to be not just large but cheap to launch. Whereas agencies like NASA and ESA must carefully choose a smattering of missions to fund, with launch costs in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, Starship’s affordability could open the door to many more. “The low cost of access has the potential to really change the game for science research,” says Andrew Westphal, a lecturer in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, with flights potentially as low as  $2 million per launch . “You can imagine privately financed missions and consortia of citizens who get together to fly things.”

What’s more, Starship has a key advantage over other super-heavy-lift rockets in development, such as NASA’s much-delayed Space Launch System and Blue Origin’s  New Glenn rocket . The upper half of the rocket is designed to be  refueled in Earth orbit  by other Starships, so more of its lifting capability can be handed over to scientific equipment rather than fuel. Taking humans to the moon, for example, might require  eight separate launches , with each consecutive “tanker Starship” bringing up fuel to the “lunar Starship” that then makes its way to the moon with scientific equipment and crew. 

Scientists are now starting to dream of what Starship might let them do. Earlier this year, a paper published by Jennifer Heldmann of NASA Ames Research Center  explored some of the scientific opportunities  that might be opened by Starship missions to the moon and Mars. One great benefit is that Starship could carry full-sized equipment from Earth—no need to miniaturize it to fit in a smaller vehicle, as was required for the Apollo missions to the moon. For example, “you could bring a drilling rig,” says Heldmann. “You could drill down a kilometer, like we do on Earth.” That would afford unprecedented access to the interior of the moon and Mars, where ice and other useful resources are thought to be present. Before, such an idea have been “a little bit insane,” says Heldmann. But with Starship, “you could do it, and still have room to spare,” she adds. “What else do you want to bring?”

Because Starship can land back on Earth, it will also—theoretically—be able to bring back vast amounts of samples. The sheer volume that could be returned, from a variety of different locations, would give scientists on Earth unprecedented access to extraterrestrial material. That could shed light on a myriad of mysteries, such as the volcanic history of the moon or “the question of life and astrobiology” on Mars, says Heldmann. 

Starship could also enable more extravagant missions to other locations, either via a direct launch from Earth or perhaps by using the moon and Mars as refueling stations, an ambitious future envisioned by Musk. 

Let's go to Neptune

One idea, from an international group of scientists called  Conex  (Conceptual Exploration Research), is a spacecraft called  Arcanum , which would make use of Starship’s heavy-lifting capabilities to explore Neptune and its largest moon, Triton. Neptune has been visited only once, a flying visit by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, and there is so much we still don’t know about it. “Nobody’s really thinking on this next level about what Starship could enable,” says James McKevitt, a researcher at the University of Vienna and the co-lead of Conex. “That’s what Arcanum is designed to showcase.”

Weighing in at about 21 metric tons, the spacecraft would be four times heavier than the largest deep space probe to date: NASA and ESA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, which explored Saturn from 2004 to 2017. No existing rocket could currently launch such a craft, but Starship would make it possible. Arcanum would have numerous components, including an orbiter to study Neptune, a lander to study Triton, and a penetrator to strike Triton’s surface and “perform a seismic experiment” to understand its geology and its structure, says McKevitt. The mission could also be equipped with a telescope, allowing for studies of the outer solar system and aiding the hunt for planets around other stars. 

Other ideas are even more speculative. Philip Lubin, a physicist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, calculated that a large enough rocket, such as Starship, could be used to  prevent an asteroid from hitting Earth . Such a mission could carry enough explosives to rip apart an asteroid as large as the 10-kilometer-wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs. Its fragments would harmlessly burn up in the atmosphere before it had a chance to reach our planet. 

Starship could also be a better way to launch giant space telescopes that can observe the universe. Currently, equipment such as NASA and ESA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope must be launched  folded up , an expensive, complex, and delicate procedure that could be prone to error. NASA has suggested that a proposed super-telescope called LUVOIR designed to image Earth-like planets around other stars  could launch on Starship , while Musk has said SpaceX is already working on “an interesting project, which is to have a really big telescope, taking a lens that was intended for a ground-based telescope, and creating a space-based telescope with it.” No further details have yet been revealed.

Say hi to the neighbors

Elsewhere, some scientists have dreams of using Starship to prepare to visit other stars. René Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System research in Germany and colleagues  say that  Starship could offer a low-cost way to test technologies for a spacecraft that can travel multiple light-years to neighboring star systems. Starship could release a sail-powered spacecraft on a trip to Mars, which would use an onboard laser to push against a thin sail and reach incredible speeds, enabling a demonstration to be conducted beyond Earth’s orbit. “If SpaceX were kind enough to take one of our sails on board and just release it halfway on its journey to Mars, we should be able to follow its acceleration and path through the solar system for a few days and almost to the orbit of Jupiter,” says Heller.

Other ideas include using Starship to send a probe to orbit Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, a difficult task without a substantial lifting capability. “It’s extremely challenging because of both getting into orbit and protecting yourself from Jupiter’s harsh radiation,” says Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist from the University of Arizona. “But mass helps those things. You can have plenty of fuel and radiation shielding.”

Musk has suggested that SpaceX could launch as many as a dozen Starship test flights in 2022, with missions to the moon and Mars both on the horizon—and plenty of scientific potential to boot. “Once Starship starts flying, the development will be very fast,” says Margarita Marinova, a former senior Mars development engineer at SpaceX. “There will be so many more people who will be able to fly things.” Those could be anything from standalone missions using Starship to ride-along missions on the existing flight manifest. “When you have a 100-ton capability, adding on science hardware is pretty easy,” says Marinova. “If somebody wants to buy payload space, they can have payload space. It will be a really drastic change in how we do science.”

There are, of course, very good reasons to be cautious. While Starship has flown test flights  without the Super Heavy booster , we have yet to see the full rocket launch. It’s an extremely massive and complex machine that could still experience problems in its development. SpaceX and Musk, too, have previously been notoriously cavalier (to put it politely) with timelines and goals (a proposed mission to Mars, Red Dragon, was once supposed to have launched  as early as 2018 ). And Starship’s proposed method to reach the moon and Mars, relying on multiple refueling missions in Earth orbit, remains complex and untested.

Yet there are also plenty of grounds for excitement regarding what Starship could do if it is successful. From the inner to the outer solar system, and possibly beyond, it may well open up a whole new era of space science. “I'm sure that some very smart people are starting to think about sending scientific missions on Starship,” says Abhishek Tripathi, a space scientist from the University of California, Berkeley. 

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Bezos Launches to Space, Aiming to Reignite His Rocket Company’s Ambitions

The Amazon founder and three others lifted off in Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, fulfilling a goal more than 20 years in the making.

Highlights From Blue Origin’s Spaceflight

Blue origin’s first flight to space with humans onboard included the billionaire jeff bezos, his brother mark bezos, wally funk and oliver daemen. the team traveled more than 60 miles above earth..

“There’s Oliver on the left, Jeff Bezos on the right. We are about to go to space, everybody.” “Command engine start — two, one, ignition. We have liftoff. The Shepard has cleared the tower.” And New Shepard has cleared the tower, on her way to space with our first human crew. And booster touchdown, welcome back New Shepard.” “First up, your booster has landed.” “Booster landed.” “Our rocket went over Mach 3. And now they’re coming, floating back down at just about 15 or 16 miles an hour. What a flight.” “Welcome back to Earth. Congratulations to all of you. All of you.” [cheering] “Welcome back, astronauts.”

Video player loading

By Kenneth Chang

VAN HORN, Texas — Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, went to space on Tuesday. It was a brief jaunt — rising more than 65 miles into the sky above West Texas — in a spacecraft that was built by Mr. Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin .

While Mr. Bezos was beaten to space last week by Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur who flew in a rocket plane from his company Virgin Galactic, some analysts consider Blue Origin , founded by Mr. Bezos more than 20 years ago, to be a more significant contender in the future space economy. The company has ambitions of a scale far beyond short flights for space tourists, and it is backed by the entrepreneur who made Amazon into an economic powerhouse.

Lori Garver, who served as deputy administrator of NASA during the Obama administration, said that Mr. Bezos “has a huge, long-term vision that is multigenerational.” She added that his intent for Blue Origin was to “compete for even higher stakes” in the growing business of space.

In 2017, Mr. Bezos announced that he would sell $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund the space venture, and Blue Origin has already pursued a range of business opportunities, such as trying to win contracts for a moon lander for NASA astronauts as well as launching satellites for the Department of Defense on large reusable rockets.

In recent years before he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, Mr. Bezos would typically spend a day a week — usually Wednesdays — focused on Blue Origin. That Mr. Bezos himself was seated in the capsule for Tuesday’s space trip makes plain that he is putting spaceflight at the top of his spending list.

“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” he said a few years ago, couching his investment as a form of philanthropy.

Mr. Bezos has described a vision of humanity’s future that is influenced by the proposals of Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton physicist. In the 1970s, Dr. O’Neill proposed giant cylinder-shape space colonies that in great enough numbers would support far more people and industry than are possible on Earth.

“The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” Mr. Bezos said. “If we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power.”

rocket travel to space

By contrast, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has focused on the idea of settling Mars. Getting to Mars is an easier task than building one of O’Neill’s colonies, but making cold and airless Mars hospitable to human civilization would be an enormous undertaking.

And despite Tuesday’s successful flight, Blue Origin has much progress to make. To have the impact on humanity’s future that Mr. Bezos describes, Blue Origin will need much more than the small New Shepard vehicle that Mr. Bezos and three other passengers flew to the edge of space on Tuesday.

Although private enterprise has always worked with governments on space travel, it is only in recent decades that private companies have started seeking to make business opportunities from tourist spaceflight.

Blue Origin’s accomplishments pale next to the rocket company led by another of the world’s richest people: SpaceX, which Mr. Musk founded a couple of years after Blue Origin started.

SpaceX is already a behemoth in the space business. It regularly takes NASA astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, it has already deployed more than 1,500 satellites in its Starlink constellation to provide internet service everywhere, and it is developing a gargantuan rocket called Starship for missions for Mars and elsewhere.

By contrast, Blue Origin’s forthcoming projects, at least in the near future, do not seem poised to upend the space industry the way SpaceX has.

The larger reusable rocket for launching satellites that Mr. Bezos’ company is working on, New Glenn, is still more than a year away, and efforts to win major government contracts like launching Department of Defense satellites have so far come up empty. A lunar lander that Blue Origin hopes NASA will someday use to carry astronauts was not selected, at least for the moment, because NASA said it had money for only one design — SpaceX’s.

Blue Origin’s mascot is the tortoise. As in the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare,” perhaps with steady, constant effort, Blue Origin can catch up.

Ms. Garver recalled Mr. Bezos going to Washington to meet with her and Charles Bolden, the NASA administrator. At the time, Blue Origin was an enigma.

“We were thrilled to hear of his plan,” she said. “It was: ‘I’m here because I’m investing in a space company. I am prepared to invest a lot over the long term. And my goals are very aligned with NASA. So if I can be of help in any way, let’s work together.’”

Blue Origin was working on a capsule that could carry astronauts to the International Space Station, and it won a modest $25.6 million development contract from NASA. But work on that vehicle stalled, and Blue Origin dropped out of the competition for the contracts that ultimately went to Boeing and SpaceX.

“Slow and steady was slower than anybody hoped,” Ms. Garver said.

But the comparisons to SpaceX’s extraordinary successes are somewhat unfair, she said.

“We are really spoiled by SpaceX right now,” Ms. Garver said.

Even if Blue Origin has not yet lived up to its lofty vision, more companies will mean more competition. “I’m not really as disappointed as some people at their pace,” Ms. Garver said. “I feel they’ll get there. We need competition.”

Laura Seward Forczyk, founder of the aerospace consulting firm Astralytical, was also positive. “Although their progress has been slow, they haven’t had any large failures that indicate to me that they’re at risk,” she said. “Blue Origin is still finding its way forward.”

While Blue Origin awaits the path that Mr. Bezos will lead it down, Tuesday’s flight was a milestone, the first flight from the company to carry people to space, even though it did not enter orbit.

At 8:11 a.m. Central time, the stubby rocket and capsule, named New Shepard after Alan Shepard, the first American in space, rose from the company’s launch site in Van Horn, a thin jet of fire and exhaust streaming from the rocket’s engine.

Over the past six years, Blue Origin has conducted 15 successful test flights without people aboard, and engineers deemed that New Shepard, which flies with no pilot, was finally ready for passengers — their boss included.

The other three passengers were Mr. Bezos’ brother, Mark; Oliver Daemen, a Dutch student who was Blue Origin’s first paying passenger; and Mary Wallace Funk, a pilot who in the 1960s was among a group of women who passed the same rigorous astronaut selection criteria employed by NASA but who, until Tuesday, never had the chance to board a rocket.

At 18, Mr. Daemen was the youngest person ever to go to space. At 82, Ms. Funk, who goes by Wally, was the oldest.

“I want to thank you, sweetheart,” Ms. Funk said to Jeff Bezos during a news conference. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

Video Shows Inside the Blue Origin Flight to Space

The blue origin crew included four passengers who had fun during the short flight, playing with skittles and experimenting with gravity..

“You just have to wait for it. Who wants a Skittle?” “Oh yeah, throw me one.” “See if you can catch this in your mouth.” Group: “Yeah!” “Well done. Here, toss me one.” “Here, catch.” “Oh, yeah.” “Whoo hoo!” “Has it been everything you thought it would be?” “Fantastic!” “Here, look — Oliver.”

Video player loading

Once the booster had used up its propellant, the capsule detached from the rocket at an altitude of about 47 miles. Both pieces continued to coast upward to 66.5 miles, passing the 62-mile boundary often considered to be the beginning of outer space.

The passengers unbuckled and floated around the capsule, somersaulting and tossing Ping-Pong balls and Skittles candy as they experienced about four minutes of free fall.

The booster landed vertically near the launch site, similar to SpaceX’s rival reusable Falcon 9 rocket. The capsule then descended under parachutes until it gently set down in a puff of dust.

Ten minutes and 10 seconds after launch, it was over. A few minutes later, the four emerged euphorically from the capsule, greeted with hugs from friends and family.

Two more passenger-carrying flights are scheduled for this year with the company hoping to speed the pace of operations next year. Blue Origin has declined to say how much the early customers are paying or how many have signed up. However, Mr. Bezos said: “We’re approaching $100 million in private sales already. And the demand is very, very high.”

In addition to the high cost of tickets to ride on New Shepard, Mr. Bezos also called attention to the vast wealth at his disposal when he remarked on how it was possible for him to finance Blue Origin in the first place.

“I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” Mr. Bezos said in a news conference after the flight, “because you guys paid for all of this.”

That remark prompted a number of scornful responses from critics. Perhaps to blunt attacks from those who say he is just using his wealth create diversions for the wealthy, Mr. Bezos announced that he had created a prize for individual he said exemplified acts of both civility and courage.

The award offered $100 million each to two people — Van Jones, the CNN political commentator, and José Andrés, the chef and restaurateur — to be donated to charitable causes of each recipient’s choosing.

Whatever Blue Origin’s future will be, Mr. Bezos remained pleased on Tuesday. Would he make another trip?

“Hell yes,” he said. “How fast can you refuel that thing? Let’s go.”

Karen Weise and Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.

rocket travel to space

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Kenneth Chang has been at The Times since 2000, writing about physics, geology, chemistry, and the planets. Before becoming a science writer, he was a graduate student whose research involved the control of chaos. More about Kenneth Chang

What’s Up in Space and Astronomy

Keep track of things going on in our solar system and all around the universe..

Never miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other 2024 event  that’s out of this world with  our space and astronomy calendar .

A nova named T Coronae Borealis lit up the night about 80 years ago. Astronomers say it’s expected to put on another show  in the coming months.

Voyager 1, the 46-year-old first craft in interstellar space which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth, may have gone dark .

Two spacecraft have ended up askew on the moon this year, illustrating that it’s not so easy to land upright on the lunar surface. Here is why .

What do you call a galaxy without stars? In addition to dark matter and dark energy, we now have dark galaxies  — collections of stars so sparse and faint that they are all but invisible.

Is Pluto a planet? And what is a planet, anyway? Test your knowledge here .

SpaceX launches Starship rocket into orbit on test flight but loses spacecraft during return to Earth

SpaceX’s next-generation mega rocket launched Thursday morning, thundering into orbit on a key test flight meant to demonstrate new technologies and techniques that will be crucial on future missions to the moon and beyond.

The flight, held on the 22nd anniversary of SpaceX's founding, was the rocket’s third and most ambitious such test, according to the company. The event was closely watched because the nearly 400-foot-tall booster, known as Starship , is expected to play an important part in NASA’s return-to-the-moon program .

The rocket lifted off at 9:25 a.m. ET from SpaceX’s Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas. On this outing, SpaceX achieved two major milestones over previous Starship tests: The spacecraft successfully reached orbit, then re-entered Earth’s atmosphere for the first time more than 40 minutes later.

“This is the furthest and fastest that Starship has ever flown,” SpaceX officials said during their live broadcast of the event.

However, data suggests the spacecraft was lost while it returned to Earth, before it reached the splashdown in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX had hoped for.

After Thursday's test flight concluded, the Federal Aviation Administration said it was investigating a “mishap” involving the Starship vehicle and the rocket’s first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy.

“No public injuries or public property damage have been reported,” the agency said in a statement . “The FAA is overseeing the SpaceX-led mishap investigation to ensure the company complies with its FAA-approved mishap investigation plan and other regulatory requirements.”

The FAA will need to conclude its investigation and SpaceX will be required to take any corrective actions identified by the agency before Starship can fly again.

Despite the undesired ending, SpaceX called it a “phenomenal day.”

The company adjusted the targeted liftoff time Thursday morning, but Starship’s launch started smoothly. Roughly three minutes into flight, the Super Heavy first-stage booster successfully separated from the upper-stage Starship spacecraft.

However, Super Heavy did not accomplish a final burn as it fell back to Earth, causing it to splash down “hard” in the Gulf of Mexico, SpaceX said during its webcast.

SpaceX had also hoped to demonstrate several other processes and capabilities during the flight, including opening and closing the vehicle’s payload door and transferring propellant between two of Starship’s tanks in orbit. The company said it will need to analyze post-flight data to determine if those objectives were completed.

SpaceX also intended to fire one of Starship’s Raptor engines while in space, but it ultimately opted to skip that portion.

Many of the techniques attempted during Starship's third flight would help SpaceX carry out future missions to deploy satellites, as well as set the stage for moon missions as part of NASA’s Artemis program.

The company also said many of the objectives would help develop Starship into a fully reusable system. That is SpaceX's eventual plan, but it was not the intention for this test flight.

Starship was selected by NASA to carry astronauts to the lunar surface in the upcoming Artemis III mission, which could launch in 2026.

Starship's debut flight  last April ended when the rocket exploded several minutes after liftoff. A  second Starship launch  in November achieved several milestones, including separation of the first-stage booster and upper-stage spacecraft, but the  company lost contact with the vehicle shortly after.

rocket travel to space

Denise Chow is a reporter for NBC News Science focused on general science and climate change.

SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites from California in 2nd leg of spaceflight doubleheader (video)

Liftoff occurred at 12:09 p.m. EDT Monday (March 11).

SpaceX launched 23 more of its Starlink internet satellites from California on Monday (March 11), in the second leg of a spaceflight doubleheader.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Starlink spacecraft lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 12:09 a.m. EDT (0409 GMT or 9:09 p.m. PDT March 10 local time).

It was the second Starlink mission in a little over four hours; the company earlier launched 23 of the broadband craft from Florida's Space Coast . 

Related: Starlink satellite train: How to see and track it in the night sky

If all goes to plan, the Falcon 9's first stage will come back to Earth about 8.25 minutes after liftoff, making a vertical landing on the SpaceX droneship Of Course I Still Love You, which will be stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

It will be the 17th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description . Eleven of its 16 missions to date have been Starlink flights.

The Falcon 9's upper stage will continue heading toward low Earth orbit (LEO), eventually deploying the 23 Starlink satellites there about 62 minutes after launch.

—  SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches Starlink satellites on record-breaking 19th mission

—  8 ways that SpaceX has transformed spaceflight

—  SpaceX launches private Ax-3 mission to ISS, 1st Turkish astronaut on board

Starlink is SpaceX's broadband megaconstellation, which beams internet service to people around the world.

There are nearly 5,500 operational Starlink craft in LEO, but that number will continue to go up for the foreseeable future. SpaceX already has permission to deploy 12,000 Starlink satellites, and it has applied for approval for about 30,000 more on top of that.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

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Mike Wall

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with  Space.com  and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope mission — Live updates

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Life's Little Mysteries

How do space rockets work without air?

Turns out, they still rely on combustion and Newton's third law of motion.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket will once again take to the skies in 2022.

In space, rockets zoom around with no air to push against. What's their secret?

Turns out, the engines that power rockets are different than the kind of engines that power aircraft or other Earth-based equipment. Rocket engines carry everything they require into space, rather than relying on air.

Like Earthly engines, rocket engines operate using combustion. Since all forms of combustion need oxygen, rockets carry an oxidizer like liquid oxygen up to space with them. That means they don't have to rely on surrounding air like a car engine does.

"Then the rocket still has fuel, whether it's kerosene or methane or liquid hydrogen, to produce a reaction," Cassandra Marion, a science advisor to the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa, told Live Science.

Related: Does the universe rotate?

The design of the rocket includes a combustion chamber, where the oxidizer and fuel react, and then a nozzle from which the combustion products emerge, she explained.

"The explosion caused by that combustion is going to create very hot gases, which are expelled out the bottom of a rocket," Marion said. "If you drive enough force out to the bottom of the rocket, the reaction is the rocket's movement in the opposite direction."

That's a reference to Isaac Newton's third law of motion . We often phrase it to say that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, although that is not exactly how Newton termed it.

One older English translation of his Latin from 1766's " The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (volume 1) " describes that law: "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts."

In other words, rockets are working in a universe of forces. Sometimes the forces are imbalanced, which we see as a rocket's acceleration pushes its inert body upward into space. Sometimes, however, forces are balanced, such as a book resting on a table (or a rocket waiting on the launch pad for its liftoff).

"According to the third law, the table applies an equal and opposite force to the book. This force occurs because the weight of the book causes the table to deform slightly so that it pushes back on the book like a coiled spring," Britannica wrote .

The rules of motion must also take into account orbital mechanics. Around large planets like Earth , simply put, every possible altitude has a particular speed associated with it.

The highest point of an orbit is a periapsis and the lowest point is an apoapsis. As NASA explained , rockets can only increase their periapsis by turning on their engines (or otherwise increasing their energy) while at apoapsis. Or if rockets want to lower their altitude, they need to remove energy (turn engines on) at periapsis.

Earth's atmosphere acts as a continual drag on spacecraft and the International Space Station, forcing them to fire rocket engines periodically to prevent falling back to Earth. So missions in all but the highest Earth orbits must carry enough fuel to prevent that "falling back" from happening.

"There are very precise measurements of how much fuel to put in the rocket, depending on the size of the rocket, the type of fuel and everything that adds into the mass of the rocket," Marion said. Designers must also take into account Newton's Second Law . One way of rephrasing it: Forces applied to an object give them acceleration, with the amount of acceleration dependent on the object's mass.

Before sending a craft into orbit, designers must therefore account for the specific impulse of a rocket. That is a measure of how efficient the rocket fuel is in terms of amount of thrust per amount of fuel burned, NASA said. "The higher the specific impulse, the more 'push off the pad' you get per each pound of fuel," the agency added .

Adding more fuel to a rocket isn't always the solution to dealing with orbital issues. That's because more fuel means more mass, which adds to the cost of a mission because it will take more energy to push the spacecraft and rocket off the launchpad.

NASA often uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, because that combination delivers the highest specific impulse of any commonly used rocket fuel, according to the agency. However, hydrogen has such a low density that it is impractical to use the propellant on its own: The tank would be "too big, too heavy and with too much insulation protecting the cryogenic propellant to be practical," the agency said.

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That's why many launching rocket missions require boosters. One example today is NASA's Space Launch System , a deep space rocket for moon missions  designed to use two boosters. Together, the boosters deliver 75% of the total launching thrust required to get the SLS off the ground.

For more distant destinations, space agencies get creative. To save on money when shooting for far-away planets such as Jupiter , some spacecraft whip around a planet (say, Venus) and use its gravity to get a speed boost. This shortens the time it takes to get to other destinations and requires a rocket to carry less fuel than required to go so far away.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Third time is the charm for Elon Musk's giant Starship rocket.

Geoff Brumfiel, photographed for NPR, 17 January 2019, in Washington DC.

Geoff Brumfiel

rocket travel to space

The third test flight of Starship is set to launch Thursday March 14 at around 8AM. Brandon Bell/Getty Images hide caption

The third test flight of Starship is set to launch Thursday March 14 at around 8AM.

The first time, it tumbled out of control and exploded; the second time, an onboard fire triggered its self-destruct mechanism.

Now, SpaceX will once again attempt to fly its giant rocket, Starship.

A 110-minute launch window opened at 8 a.m. ET. SpaceX is streaming the launch on its website and on the social media platform X. Launch is expected just before 9:30. The company said the chances of launch were 70%, though high-level winds could be a problem. You can follow along below.

Watch Starship's third flight test https://t.co/1u46r769Vp — SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 5, 2024

It has promised "excitement guaranteed" at every stage of the flight.

The company has made upgrades and likely changed procedures since its previous attempts, but it remains to be seen whether this will be the launch that proves that the largest rocket ever built can really fly.

A 'successful failure': SpaceX's Starship achieves liftoff, loses contact mid-flight

A 'successful failure': SpaceX's Starship achieves liftoff, loses contact mid-flight

"They say that the third time is a charm," says Paulo Lozano, director of the space propulsion laboratory at MIT. But, he adds, launching a rocket as large as Starship "is not a simple task."

"Nobody has done like this before at this scale," he says.

Starship is a stainless steel monster. It stands nearly 400 feet tall, and its first stage, known as "Super Heavy," is powered by 33 Raptor engines that must all work together to heave it towards orbit.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk believes this massive machine can carry humans to the moon and Mars. Its durable stainless steel construction makes it easy to reuse, at least in theory, and could dramatically reduce the cost of launching satellites and people into orbit. NASA has given billions to SpaceX to develop Starship as a lunar landing system that could deliver astronauts to the lunar surface.

rocket travel to space

SpaceX's Starship last April ended after the rocket spun out of control and eventually exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. Eric Gay/AP hide caption

SpaceX's Starship last April ended after the rocket spun out of control and eventually exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.

But before Starship can fulfill these lofty ambitions, it's got to fly. In its first test, nearly a year ago, the spacecraft made it off the ground, but it did considerable damage to the launch pad in the process, hurling concrete and debris for up to half-a-mile . Multiple engines in the first stage gave out, and as the rocket fell back to Earth, its self-destruct system also failed to properly destroy it. It tumbled out of control for several seconds before finally breaking apart.

SpaceX wants this supersized rocket to fly. But will investors send it to the Moon?

SpaceX wants this supersized rocket to fly. But will investors send it to the Moon?

The second flight in November was more successful . The launch pad was not obliterated by the 33 engines, all of which fired as expected. The Starship also successfully separated from its booster at the predetermined altitude. But the booster failed to reignite its engines properly and exploded before it could descend back to the Gulf of Mexico. Starship's self-destruct system (beefed up after the first flight) also detonated before it could reach its desired altitude.

Scott Manley, a popular YouTuber who closely tracks Starship launches, says that the second stage likely failed because it had too much fuel and oxidizer aboard. To try and reduce mass as it flew into space, "it began dumping excess oxygen," he says. Unfortunately, the oxygen, which is highly flammable, apparently caught fire either in or around the rear of the rocket. "There was a fire in there that got turbo-charged by having oxygen just leak all over it," he says.

This time around, Manley says several additional changes have been made. Based on photos taken by rocket-watchers near the site, the fire suppression system appears to have been beefed up and the oxygen-dumping system has also been tweaked. "That will probably solve that problem," he says, but adds, "It doesn't guarantee they've solved every single problem."

Starship has also added additional tasks to the flight test. It will attempt to briefly open its payload bay doors while in orbit. And it will conduct a test to see whether it can transfer propellant from one fuel tank to another. Moving fuel around will be critical for both lunar and Martian trips, as the vehicle will need to top off its tanks for both journeys.

Lozano says that fuel transfer is particularly challenging in space.

"All of these propellants have very high vapor pressure," he says. That means if they're exposed to the vacuum of space, they will "decompress explosively." Even the act of pumping fuel is tricky in zero gravity, Lozano, says, because there's no force pressing the fuel towards the bottom of the tanks, where pumps might normally operate.

"There is no experience doing this kind of thing," he says. "It's a new technology, but I'm pretty sure that technically it's possible to do."

Finally, Starship will also attempt to relight its Raptor engines before re-entering Earth's atmosphere. Both Manley and Lozano say they will be closely watching that process.

As Starship enters the atmosphere, "you need to protect it from massive amounts of heating," Manley says. The underbelly of the ship is covered in thermal protection tiles, he says, but "they've been falling off on every single test. So it remains to be seen whether they can actually keep enough tiles on Starship for it to make it through re-entry."

"If it comes back in one piece, I think it's going to be a big success," Lozano says.

In total, the flight test will take a little over an hour, and — assuming all goes well — the spaceship will splash down in the Indian Ocean.

Correction March 14, 2024

A previous version of this story said Starship's second launch was in December of 2024. The launch took place on November 18.

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NASA's Crew-7 returns to Earth in SpaceX Dragon from ISS mission 'benefitting humanity'

Their return caps a 199-day mission that saw explorers from russian, europe, the united states and japan launch in late august on a falcon 9 rocket bound for the famed space station..

rocket travel to space

An international crew of spacefarers has safely returned to Earth in the SpaceX Dragon Endurance after spending nearly six months aboard the International Space Station readying NASA for deep-space missions ahead of its impending return to the moon .

The four people who were part of the NASA-funded Crew-7 mission made a fiery landing Tuesday morning when they splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Following the spacecraft's landing at 5:47 a.m. ET, a recovery vessel transported the crew to shore before they were to be flown to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the space agency said .

Their return caps a 199-day mission that saw explorers from Russian, Europe, the United States and Japan launch in late August on a Falcon 9 rocket bound for the famed space station . The Crew-7 members spent their stint in low-Earth orbit contributing to a variety of science experiments, some of which were to help prepare NASA for future crewed lunar missions under its Artemis program as it sets the stage for expeditions to Mars.

One of the crew's members, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, was even part of a rare all-female spacewalk .

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Who was part of SpaceX Crew-7?

Moghbeli was the sole American who was part of the four-member Crew-7 who launched Aug. 26 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Also part of the crew were Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov, Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen with the European Space Agency, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa .

It took the crew about 30 hours after lift-off to  dock  to the International Space Station's Harmony module’s port .

During the course of their stay, the four spacefarers traveled more than 84.4 million miles, completing 3,184 orbits around Earth, NASA said. While Mogensen has now logged 209 days in space in two flights and Furukawa has logged 366 days, the mission marked the first spaceflight for Moghbeli and Borisov.

The Crew-7 flight was part of NASA’s commercial crew program  in which the space agency is partnering with private companies like SpaceX to ferry trained astronauts to the space station for scientific missions. The eighth crew comprised of three NASA astronauts and one cosmonaut launched March 3 and docked March 5 just days before their predecessors prepared to depart on Monday.

The partnership with private industry is meant to free up NASA to focus on building spacecrafts and rockets for deep space missions.

"This international crew showed that space unites us all," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. "It’s clear that we can do more – we can learn more – when we work together."

What did the crew do aboard the International Space Station?

The crew were able to conduct hundreds of experiments during the science and research mission, including the first study of the human response to different spaceflight durations.

They also experimented with growing food on the space station , a critical capability needed for future deep-space flights and long-term crewed missions, NASA said.

In November, Moghbeli conducted a spacewalk with fellow NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara , making for a rare moment when two women exited the station to complete maintenance activities in the void of space. Together, the astronauts replaced one of the 12 trundle bearing assemblies on a solar alpha rotary joint, which allows them to rotate properly and generate electricity to power the orbital complex .

As NASA eyes future crewed missions to the moon and beyond, Nelson said the experiments will contribute to the knowledge needed to send humans into the cosmos.

If NASA is able to launch its delayed Artemis II mission to circumnavigate the moon by the projected end of 2025, it would make for the first crewed lunar mission since the space agency's Apollo program came to an end in 1972. Ultimately, the U.S. agency hopes to send astronauts back to the lunar surface itself in 2026 for Artemis III to establish a base of operations ahead of  trips to Mars .

"The science experiments conducted during their time in space will help prepare for NASA’s bold missions at the moon, Mars, and beyond," Nelson said, "all while benefitting humanity here on Earth.”

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]

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How fast can a rocket go?

The speeds of rockets is normally measured in meters or kilometers per second (m/s, km/s or kps). Rockets have to go very fast to leave Earth and get into space. Here are a few examples of how fast rockets travel:

To get to low Earth orbit: 7.8 km/s (28,100 km/h; 17,400 mph).

To escape Earth's gravity and leave Earth behind: 11.19 km/s (40,284 km/h; 25,031 mph). This is known as Earth escape velocity .

Juno spacecraft heading to Jupiter: 58 km/s (209,000 kph; 130,000 mph). The speed is relative to the Sun.

Parker Solar Probe: 148 km/s (532,000 kph; 331,000 mph).

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SpaceX launched the third integrated flight test of its Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage from the company’s Starbase orbital launch pad at 8:25 a.m. CT on March 14. This flight test is an important milestone toward providing NASA with a Starship HLS for its Artemis missions.

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How Fast Rockets Must Travel To Reach Space And Go Beyond

When orbital rockets are launched, they seem to lift off very slowly from a launchpad, but in minutes, they are traveling at hypersonic speeds, raising the question of how fast rockets must travel to reach space and beyond.

A rocket must travel at a speed of approximately 28 000 km/h or 17 500 mph to achieve Low Earth Orbit and 40 000 km/h or 25 000 mph to break free from Earth’s gravity. It can further increase its speed to several hundred thousand miles per hour by using the gravitational pull from celestial bodies.

It is hard to believe that orbital launch vehicles are among the fastest human-made objects ever produced when observing how painfully slowly it seems to lift off from a launchpad during any significant rocket launch.

Yet, these large spacecraft pick up speed very quickly, and by the time they reach orbit, a rocket is traveling many magnitudes faster than the speed of the fastest rifle bullet. (Up to 7 times the speed a modern high-velocity rifle cartridge produces, traveling at 4000 km/h or 2500 mph.)

The following sections will describe how fast rockets actually travel, why they can’t travel any faster, and possible innovations to overcome obstacles for accelerating in space.

Atlas V Rocket

How Fast A Rocket Must Travel To Reach Earth Orbit

In order to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and establish an orbit around the planet, a rocket has to travel very fast. In fact, it has to reach and maintain a speed of approximately 28 000 km/h (17 500 mph) or 7.9 kilometers per second to stay in orbit.

Rockets need to achieve these high speeds since the Earth’s gravity extends for thousands of miles into space and will eventually drag all objects back to its surface without any form of countermeasure. For a spacecraft, this comes in the shape of forward momentum or speed.

A spacecraft, satellite, or any other object use a combination of its forward momentum (speed) and the Earth’s gravitational pull to remain in orbit around the planet. They need both forces to stay airborne.

A spacecraft traveling in a specific orbit around the Earth is always flying towards the horizon at a speed of 7.9 kilometers per second. At the same time, the Earth’s gravity is pulling the craft down.

By combining these two forces, a spacecraft can stay at a fixed altitude while orbiting the planet. Since the Earth is round, the vehicle will start to pull away from the Earth if it travels any faster. If it travels any slower, the planet’s gravity will start to pull it towards the surface.

As already stated in other publications, it would be fair to say that spacecraft and satellites essentially “fall around the Earth in orbit.” It is just their forward momentum or speed that stops them from being pulled back to the planet’s surface by the Earth’s gravity.

How Fast A Rocket Must Travel To Escape Earth’s Gravity

Maintaining an orbit around the Earth is one thing. Breaking free from it to travel to another celestial body or deeper into space is quite another.

For a spacecraft to break free from Earth’s gravity and travel deeper into space, it has to accelerate to a speed of 40 000 km/h (25 000 mph) or 11 kilometers per second.

Typically, a spacecraft will first establish an orbit around the Earth before burning its upper stage engines to accelerate the vehicle to escape velocity (the speed required to break free from Earth’s gravity) and put the craft on a trajectory to reach its destination.

Saturn V S IVB Third Stage

For example, the Saturn V rocket that carried American astronauts to the Moon during the Apollo missions first established a parking orbit at an altitude of 190 km (118 miles) around the Earth before firing its third stage thrusters which put it on a trajectory to the Moon.

(This was done in part to perform multiple system checks to ensure all equipment is functioning correctly before putting the spacecraft on a Trans Lunar Injection orbit.)

After firing its third stage engines, the Apollo spacecraft accelerated to a speed of 40 319 km/h (25 053 mph) , putting the vehicle on a trajectory for Trans Lunar Injection (TLI) , after which the Moon’s gravity eventually assisted in capturing and pulling the craft closer.

Even at these meteoric speeds by Earth standards (the fastest commercial airliners travel at speeds of “merely” 950 km/h or 590 mph) , they are still fairly pedestrian in terms of the vast distances that have to be covered to reach celestial bodies in and beyond our solar system.

For example, the time it takes to travel to the Moon, our only satellite and closest celestial body, takes approximately 3 days with current technology. And the Moon is just 384 400 km (238 855 miles) from Earth.

Space agencies like SpaceX and NASA are targeting Mars as the next destination for human spaceflight. However, with current technology, it will take approximately 9 months to travel to the planet, which is an average distance of 225 million km (140 million miles) from Earth.

At present, returning humans to the Moon is a massive undertaking for the most advanced launch vehicle manufacturer. Putting a human on the surface of Mars is currently just a theoretical possibility, and this is not even close to the furthest reaches of our solar system.

Needless to say, physically exploring anything beyond our solar system is but a pipedream. To put it in perspective, the star nearest to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light-years away from Earth. That is a distance of 40 208 000 000 000 kilometers.

Parker Solar Probe

Currently, the fastest (uncrewed) spacecraft ever created, the Parker Solar Probe, will orbit the Sun at a speed of 700 000 km/h (430 000 mph) on its closest approach. But even at this speed, it will take more than 6 500 years to reach our nearest neighbor.

The question often raised is why engineers don’t just design spacecraft that can accelerate to achieve the speeds that would cover these vast distances in a much shorter period. Unfortunately, as the following section will illustrate, it is not that simple.

Why A Rocket Cannot Travel Any Faster

When lifting off, more than 80% of a rocket’s mass consists of fuel. The vast majority of this fuel is expended just to get the launch vehicle out of the Earth’s atmosphere and into Low Earth Orbit.

This great fuel expenditure is primarily due to the energy required for a rocket to lift several tons of vehicle & fuel, push through the drag created by the thick atmosphere surrounding the planet, and break free from the Earth’s gravitational pull.

The fuel left in the spacecraft after reaching space is used for orbital maneuvering, attitude adjustments, and putting the vehicle on the correct trajectory to reach the mission objective and, if required, return to the planet’s surface.

Accelerating to orbit alone requires a multistage rocket, which means a launch vehicle consists of more than one stage, each with its own propulsion system and fuel. Each stage is ignited in a specific sequence to allow the rocket to reach space.

(The Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts to the moon was a three-stage launch vehicle. Learn more about rocket staging and why it is necessary for an orbital rocket to reach space in this article .)

Apollo 11 First Stage Separation

As a result, there is very little fuel left in a spacecraft for the long acceleration needed to come even close to the speeds required to drastically reduce the time to reach other planets in our solar system or explore deep space beyond it.

Companies like SpaceX are exploring the idea of refueling launch vehicles in space with its Starship Program, but at the time of writing, this was still in the early development phase.

But even if refueling in space were a reality, it would still not be possible to accelerate a crewed spacecraft to the speed of light or even close to it due to multiple factors, as the following section will illustrate.

Why Spacecraft Can Not Accelerate To The Speed Of Light

The previous section touched on difficulties launch vehicles have to overcome to escape the Earth’s thick atmosphere and gravity to put a heavy launch vehicle and payload into orbit and the amount of propellant expended in the process.

However, even if a rocket can be fully fueled in space, there are a number of other obstacles that it needs to overcome to enable the spacecraft to accelerate to anything remotely close to traveling at the speed of light.

For example, the structure of a rocket, which is already made as light as possible to reduce mass, needs to be extremely strong to withstand the immense forces this type of acceleration will put on the vehicle.

(L earn more about the four primary sections or structures that a rocket consists of as well as their function in this article .)

Falcon 9 Interstage

And even if it was possible for the structure to be strong enough to withstand the forces generated by such a sustained acceleration, the amount of additional mass required to strengthen the spacecraft will work against and counteract its ability to gain speed.

Another potential problem is navigation. Rockets have sophisticated guidance systems that allow them to maneuver & keep it on a specific trajectory. In most cases, the destination and trajectory to reach it are well defined, with all possible obstacles in the way clearly identified.

However, if spacecraft travel at a mere fraction of the speed of light, especially through the vast space beyond our solar system, navigation becomes infinitely more complex and dangerous. Space may be vast & empty but is still littered with unidentified smaller objects.

Objects like small rogue comets & asteroids are often difficult to identify at a distance and, at the velocity a spacecraft will travel, it may be impossible to detect. Even if a craft is able to identify an object, it may be impossible to react & avoid it in time at such a high velocity.

But there are two factors that currently makes traveling close to the speed of light practically and theoretically impossible:

Special Relativity

Limitations of the human body.

Both these factors are part theory part fact, but enough real-life scenarios have proven them to be a reality, and any one of them by themselves makes the idea of space travel at light speed a little more than wishful thinking at the moment.

Throughout this article, the amount of fuel spent during a rocket’s launch, as well as the mass it has to carry into space, has been mentioned. It also highlighted the fact that space agencies are in the process of devising plans to refuel launch vehicles in orbit.

Combined with the fact that spacecraft do not have to deal with huge gravitational forces or a thick atmosphere in space, the argument can be made that a fully fueled rocket in orbit is free to accelerate without much restraint.

Unfortunately, this is where the theory of Special Relativity comes in. A spacecraft still has a mass that has to be moved, no matter where it finds itself. Even in space, a certain amount of energy has to be expended to move an object with a significant amount of mass.

According to the theory of Special Relativity, an object’s mass will continue to increase as it accelerates, and as it approaches the speed of light, its mass will grow to infinity.

This means the amount of energy required to propel this growing mass forward will also grow to infinity. In other words, no amount of fuel will be enough to allow a spacecraft to reach the speed of light.

When it comes to crewed spaceflight, a much bigger problem arises that dwarfs the technical difficulties of accelerating a rocket to speeds that will make interstellar travel possible. And that problem is the frailty and limitations of the human body.

When any object accelerates, it generates a force that is measured in G’s, where a g-force of 1 equals the strength with which the Earth’s gravity pulls all objects to its surface. All humans experience this force at all times, whether we sleep, work, sit, or exercise.

F-16

However, when an object accelerates at a rate that generates a force greater than 1 g, it starts to place additional stress on the human body. As acceleration increases, so does the g-force, which causes blood to start flowing away from a person’s brain to the feet.

If this continues, a person will start to develop symptoms like tunnel vision, followed by a blackout, loss of consciousness, and ultimately death if the acceleration continues to persist. The average human being can withstand a maximum of 9 g’s but only for a few seconds.

(Trained fighter pilots can sustain g-forces of 9 g’s for longer periods, but modern aircraft like an F-16 are capable of generating much higher g-forces than even they can handle.)

As a result, the amount of acceleration that will be experienced if a spacecraft “jumps” to light speed almost instantaneously, as portrayed in science-fiction movies, will cause the human body to be crushed and a person instantly killed.

Even at an acceleration at 9 g’s, the maximum force a human can handle for a very short time, it will take a rocket 19 days to reach half the speed of sound. By this time, anyone on board would have passed away from the sustained acceleration.

Until some form of mechanism or means of protecting the human body against these forces can be developed, this will always be a limiting factor that has to be taken into consideration.

A rocket travels fast, very fast. At an escape velocity of 40 000 km/h or 25 000 mph, it is faster than a high-velocity rifle bullet and faster than any fighter aircraft on the planet.

There are limitations to the speed they can reach, though, as this article illustrated. The technology currently available, the limitations described by the theory of Special Relativity, and the frailty of the human body make reaching and traveling at lightspeed impossible.

Maneuvers like Gravity Assist (using celestial bodies) and new technologies like solar sails (that use solar rays to propel a spacecraft forward very much like the wind drives a sailship) all help increase a rocket’s speed while traveling through space.

It remains to be seen if current limitations can be overcome and how fast that will allow rockets to travel in the future.

This article was originally published on headedforspace.com. If it is now published on any other site, it was done without permission from the copyright owner.

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Wessel has been a rocket enthusiast since watching the first launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia on April 12, 1981. Ever since he has keenly followed new developments in the rocket and space industry. Wessel is constantly researching all aspects of rocket technology and shares his knowledge with readers around the world.

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Watch: SpaceX's Starship enters space on third test flight, lost on re-entry

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With millions of online viewers watching, SpaceX achieved initial success on the third flight test of its most powerful rocket, following two failed attempts last year, but lost contact with the vehicle over the Indian Ocean upon reentry.

The Starship launched at approximately 8:25 a.m. Central Time from Starbase, the company's spaceport located in Boca Chica. Situated along the Gulf of Mexico, this beach town is approximately 20 miles from the border.

Throughout the livestream, which aired on the SpaceX website and on X (formerly Twitter), SpaceX employees cheered and clapped with excitement, praising the journey as "phenomenal" as it entered space and continued its flight for more than 45 minutes.

Despite the eventual outcome, the SpaceX team still deemed the test flight a success as it surpassed the achievements of previous tests.

More: SpaceX is launching a Starship test flight in Texas. Two failed attempts ignite concern

Watch: SpaceX Starship launch live stream

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What went wrong with the two previous SpaceX launches in Texas?

SpaceX launched the first Starship test flight in April, but the vehicle encountered issues only 24 miles above the Gulf of Mexico when leaking propellant caused a fire in the Super Heavy booster, according to a story in  Florida Today .  This caused SpaceX to lose communication and control of the vehicle, but the Autonomous Flight Safety System took over and it detonated in less than four minutes.

In November, the Starship took flight again, reaching space for the first time, according to the SpaceX website. However, it encountered issues with the liquid oxygen supply during the flight, resulting in the failure of one engine and causing the vehicle to ignite into flames.

According to the SpaceX website, the failure was “determined to be filter blockage where liquid oxygen is supplied to the engines, leading to a loss of inlet pressure in engine oxidizer pumps that eventually resulted in one engine failing in a way that resulted in the loss of the vehicle."

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How Fast Do Rockets Travel In Space?

If you’re curious about how fast rockets travel to reach in space, you are not alone. Space technology has come a long way in the last few decades. And more people are interested to learn about it than ever before.

Rockets are essential to space travel , allowing us to explore new worlds and discover further information about our universe. In this blog post, we’ll answer the question, “how fast do rockets travel to reach in space?”

What is the speed of a rocket in space and how is it measured?

Space travel has been a desired topic for centuries. And only in the last few decades has it become a reality for ordinary people. One of the essential technologies that make space tourism possible is rocket propulsion. Rockets can reach high speeds by ejecting large amounts of hot gas. The speed of a rocket can be measured by its exhaust velocity.

The exhaust velocity is the speed at which the gas exits the rocket’s nozzle. Exhaust velocity is usually calculated in kilometers per second (km/s). Spacecraft that use rocket propulsion usually have exhaust velocities of 2-4 km/s, which means they can travel from Earth to low Earth orbit in just a few minutes.

The speed of a rocket in space is quite fast, but it can alter depending on the mission or destination. For example, a rocket headed to the International Space Station would need to travel much slower than one headed for Mars . The speed of a rocket is also measured in miles per hour (mph). For example, the fastest Space Shuttle typically traveled around 17,500 km/h (10,860 mph) when in orbit.

Rocket propulsion is also used for other applications such as satellite launches and space exploration. The Space Shuttle , for example, has an exhaust velocity of around 4.5 km/s.

In contrast, chemical rockets used for blastoff typically have exhaust velocities of 5-8 km/s.

As Space Technology advances, we can wish to see even higher speeds attained by rockets in the future. One day we can even travel to other planets using this fantastic technology!

How Fast Do Rockets Travel to Reach in Space

How does the speed of a rocket change in different environments (vacuum vs atmosphere)?

While early rocket experiments were restricted to suborbital flights , modern space technology has made it travel much farther and faster.

However, the speed of a rocket is not steady, and it varies depending on the environment in which it operates. A rocket can reach very high speeds due to the lack of air resistance in a vacuum, like in outer space .

But, in an atmosphere like Earth, the air resistance slows down the rocket’s speed. As a result, rockets are typically directed into space from Earth using powerful boosters that enable them to overcome the atmosphere’s drag.

Once the rocket reaches space, it can accelerate to much higher speeds. Space tourism is a rapidly growing industry, and trips to outer space are becoming increasingly popular. With advances in space technology, it is now feasible for people to experience the bliss of rocket travel.

What factors affect the speed of a rocket launch (weight, propellant, altitude)?

Many factors affect the speed of a rocket launch.

  • One is the weight of the rocket. The heavier the rocket, the more fuel is needed to achieve lift-off.
  • Another factor is the sort of propellant (fuel) used. Solid fuel rockets are faster than liquid-fuel rockets because they can ignite more quickly.
  • Finally, altitude can also impact launch speed. Rockets launched from higher altitudes will achieve more incredible speeds due to the thinner atmosphere.

Space technology has come a long way in recent years, making it possible to launch rockets with incredible speed and accuracy. This has made space travel more accessible and opened up new exploration and industry opportunities. All of these factors must be considered when planning a rocket launch.

The Fastest Crewed Mission

Space technology has arrived a long way in the last century. Crewed missions to space were once believed to be a far-off dream, but now they are a reality. And with technological advances, these missions are evolving faster and more efficiently.

The fastest crewed mission was the Space Shuttle Columbia, which completed a round-trip to space in just over two days. This mission was achievable due to advanced propulsion systems and new materials that let the shuttle travel at high speeds.

While this mission was especially for scientific research , it also laid the groundwork for future space tourism and travel . Space flight is no longer just for government astronauts and scientists; it is now available to anyone who desires to explore. And as the industry continues to evolve, we hope for even faster and more efficient crewed missions to become a reality.

How Fast Rockets Travel to Reach in Space

What are some of the challenges associated with traveling at high speeds in space?

Even with our current technology, space travel is even fraught with challenges. One of the biggest challenges is simply traveling at high speeds in space. The fuel needed to propel a spacecraft to such high velocities is fantastic, and the tiniest miscalculation can result in disaster.

In addition, the human body is not created to resist the G-forces associated with space travel. Astronauts must undergo intense physical training before launching a space flight, and even then, they are at risk of long-term health problems.

Space tourism is another challenge associated with high-speed space travel. As the industry evolves, there will be an increasing need for flights to famous destinations like the Moon and Mars .

However, the cost of flights will likely be prohibitive for most people, making them unavailable to all but the wealthiest individuals. Ultimately, high-speed space travel remains an exciting but challenging prospect that will continue to inspire scientists and dreamers for years to come.

What are some future applications for rockets that travel at high speeds?

Rockets have already transformed how we travel and explore Space and our planet. In the future, they may become an even more essential part of our lives as we continue to stretch the boundaries of what is doable.

One potential application for high-speed rockets is Space tourism. Imagine being able to take a flight into Space, or even to another world, in a subject of hours. This would open up a new world of chances for vacationers and make Space travel more obtainable to the general public.

Rockets may also utilize to transport goods and materials faster around the globe. With rocket-powered flight, we could reduce travel time for both people and cargo, making it possible to get from one side of the world to the other in hours. This would significantly impact the economy and could guide to a more connected global community.

As we continue to develop new technology, we will likely find even more uses for high-speed rockets. They could become commonplace in space exploration and terrestrial travel, making it possible to reach new heights and explore our universe like never before.

How Fast Do Rocket Travel to Reach in Space

How will new technologies help us to explore deep space and beyond?

With new technologies, we can now explore deep space and even further what we once thought possible. Space tourism is now a reality, with companies like Virgin Galactic providing trips to space.

Space flight is also becoming more achievable with the development of SpaceShipTwo and other commercial spacecraft . These new technologies are not only opening up the chance of space travel for people but also opening up new options for exploration and research.

The space industry is predicted to grow significantly in the next few years, and new technologies will play a significant role in this growth. With the help of such technologies, we will be capable of exploring the universe in ways that were once impossible.

Rockets are essential to space exploration and have been used for centuries to help us explore our universe. As technology enhances, we continue to find new and innovative ways to use rockets to push us further into space.

With the advent of high-speed travel, we can explore regions of space that were once inaccessible. In the future, we will continue to rely on rockets as our primary mode of transportation for deep space exploration and beyond.

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  • Have any spacecraft landed on an asteroid?
  • Have we sent spacecrafts to Pluto?
  • How long does it take to get to Uranus from Earth?
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  • Will we ever travel to the stars?
  • How long would it take a spacecraft to reach the nearest galaxy?
  • How much space debris is orbiting Earth?
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How fast does a rocket have to travel to get into space?

  • What was the first man-made object to reach another world?

This really depends on what you mean by "into space." If you just want to get into orbit around the Earth, you need to reach speeds of at least 4.9 miles per second, or about 17,600 miles per hour. If you want to completely escape Earth's gravity and travel to another moon or planet, though, you need to be going even faster - at a speed of at least 7 miles per second or about 25,000 miles per hour.

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