In light of the recent launches I was wondering why rockets launch straight up instead of taking of like a plane.
It seems to take so much fuel to go straight up, and in my mind I can’t see to get my head around why they don’t take off like a plane and go up gradually like that.
Edit – Spelling and grammar
Edit 2 – Thank you to everyone who responded. You have answered a life long question.
In: Physics
Technically they do eventually end up horizontal sort of like a plane. The entire point is to get high enough and go fast enough so you basically fall endlessly while the Earth curves away. This is how we make things orbit our planet.
Down at sea level the air is quite thick and gravity its most effective. Space rockets go sort of straight up (they tend to start turning over in an arc early on to start their horizontal acceleration) to get up to the thinner air as quickly as possible as they have limited fuel.
Rockets need to carry everything that makes them fly with them including oxygen to make the engines work. The issue there is it increases weight, which means the rocket needs to be bigger to hold more fuel to lift it, which increases weight, and so on. We get past the problem now by staging, where we throw away spent engines to reduce weight while in flight.
In theory starting higher is more efficient. There are projects being tested that would launch rockets from large, high flying aircraft. The problem is that these planes need to get up to altitude as well which restricts the size of the payload they can bring. You will not be launching a Mars mission from a Virgin Galactic in its current state.
Still, the dream is to make it as cheap and efficient as possible so more and more people can have access to the space industry.
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