Basically the post title, wouldn’t it be faster to go through the atmosphere at an angle instead of pushing up through the atmosphere? Is it possible to launch a spaceship this way?
I never took high school physics so this may be an exceptionally dumb question.
Edit: Thanks for all the explanations! I understand why now
In: Physics
To save fuel.
When you send up a spacecraft you don’t just have to go up, in fact the ‘up’ part is the easy part, you also have to accelerate to go faster. A lot faster.
You need to bring your spacecraft up to speeds that would be dozens of time the speed of sound down on the ground.
You also spend most of your rocket fuel on accelerating you rocket full of rocket fuel to go faster in the process.
Now you could accelerate horizontally near the ground and then move up, but near the ground there is a lot of air in the way.
Air resistance is a thing. The faster you go the more of a drag that atmosphere thing becomes.
Th easiest solution is to go up first and then wehn you are at higher altitude were there is less air in the way, you turn sideways and accelerate horizontally.
This of course is only an issue on places that have air. On the moon for example you only would need to be high enough to not run into any mountains before you started to accelerate sideways to get into orbit.
There are some experimental rocket designs that tried the whole horizontal start thing. One currently beingtested by Virgin (I think) is to starp a rocket under the wing of a 747, take the 747 up to high altitude and then let it go from there.
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