I’ve never really understood the physics of this. Obviously it works somehow — I’m not a moonlanding denier or anything — but my (admittedly primitive) brain continues to insist that a rocket thruster needs something to push *against* in order to work.
So what is it pushing against if space is essentially a void?
In: 7157
Fun fact — you’re in no worse company than [The New York Times](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/07/19/the-correction-heard-round-the-world-when-the-new-york-times-apologized-to-robert-goddard/), here.
[This was the actual text published](https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/factoids/images/ny-times-correction-goddard.jpg) on Apollo 11’s launch day. 😛
(And, to make it even better: Robert Goddard *really* *did* have some fundamentally flawed ideas about how rockets work; just not *that* one. He bought into something called the “pendulum rocket fallacy,” believing a rocket would be more stable if the engine nozzle was at the top of the ship, rather than the bottom, which we now know to be false. So the moral is… rocket science is just un-intuitive sometimes. :P)
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