I was watching a video of a Saturn 5 Rocket launch and I was amazed at how much fuel was used and how massive the explosion at the beginning was (and how massive the continuous fuel burn was).
But it got me thinking can we, in the future, develop rockets which can lift more payload per gallon of fuel or are all of our rockets equally efficient in terms of the rocketry version of “Miles per Gallon” because of some law of physics which we already mastered?
And I know there are alternatives like Space Elevators, but I’m specifically curious about rockets.
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The “efficiency” of rocket engine is measured in something called “specific impulse”, which is largely controlled by the chemistry. So there’s not much we can do there. Rocket engines are already extremely efficient in terms of converting chemical energy to motion. Much more so than internal combustion engines are. There’s just way less wasted energy on superfluous motion and friction as there is with something with moving components.
This means that the only real way to improve the overall rocket efficiency is to decrease the amount of dead-mass you have to haul around in addition to your fuel. Better materials, better engineering methods, and better structural design can do this.
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