Air resistance slow object down and the faster it goes the more air resistance increase. So the engine accelerate the Jets, but by doing that more and more of the power of the engine goes to counter the air resistance. At one point the power of the engine will be equal to the air resistance and the Jets won’t be able to go faster. For a land vehicle like a car you have the air resistance and the friction of the ground.
In space you don’t have air resistance or friction. So all the power of the engine goes toward accelerating the spacecraft. If you stop the engine of a Jet, it will slow down, but it doesn’t happen for a spacecraft, nothing slow it down. So if you keep your engine running you will continue to go up in speed indefinitely. Well technically at some point when it reach closer to the speed of light the inertia go up and the engine have an harder and harder time accelerating the spacecraft, but we are far far from this kind of speed, so this effect is almost undectable at the speed of our current spacecraft.
The same principle explain the range. We don’t need our engine to run throughout the whole trip, we can turn them on, burn our fuel and the spacecraft will keep going at the same speed even with the engine turn off. We can’t do that on earth, we need enough fuel to keep the engine running all the time.
Things in space are much farther away, so going faster will get you there sooner.
You can go faster in space because there is much less stuff (like air) in the way. The air and other stuff floating around on Earth cause resistance and friction on moving things. This makes it harder to increase speed and can wear down parts of vehicles.
The atmosphere will absolutely mess you up. The faster you go the more the atmosphere pushes back on you. This makes it significantly harder to get up to the speeds spacecraft get to, and significantly harder maintaining these speeds without the craft breaking apart. Space crafts are a relatively simple affair in this regard. Burn fuel to go fast, burn more fuel to go faster.
Latest Answers