I saw a really stupid post on Facebook talking about “how rockets don’t work.” Flat earther conspiracy nonsense. I started reading on all the points the post made and the only one I didn’t understand is how at 22 x the speed of sound a rocket does not really go over 3g’s of force.
My assumption is that as the rocket travels further from the earth the gravity influence also influences g’s on an accelerating object?
Please help me with this one.
Thank you
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**G’s are a unit of** ***acceleration***, not speed. The more gradually you speed up the longer it takes, but you can still eventually get to any speed you want.
1G = speeding up by 9.8 m/s, per second. It’s written as 9.8 m/s^(2).
So if you start from a standstill and accelerate at 1G, then after 1 second you’ll be going 9.8 meters/second speed. After 2 seconds you’re going 19.6 m/s. After 3 seconds, 29.4 m/s, etc.
Hopefully from that you can see that you can get to any speed you want without ever exceeding even 1 G of acceleration. You could get to 16958 mph without ever going over even 0.01 G if you want! It would just take long.
Example: You want to get to 16958 mph. That’s about 7581 m/s.
* If you accelerate at 1G, that will take (7581/9.8) = 773 seconds, or a little under 13 minutes.
* What if you accelerate at 3G? Well 3G = 3×9.8 = 29.4 m/s per second. So getting to 7581 m/s at 3G’s of acceleration would take 258 seconds, just over 4 mins.
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