Why do rockets launch in an arc, and not just go straight up?
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Going straight up is good to get into space, it’s not good if you want to stay there. If you fire a rocket directly up, what you’re doing isn’t launching it into space, you’re really just firing a missile at yourself, which is probably not what you want.
The difficult part of getting to space isn’t getting high enough–some jet planes can do that, you don’t need a rocket–it’s getting into orbit so that you don’t fall back down when the thrust stops.
Gravity doesn’t just stop once you go high enough. At the height of the International Space Station, gravity is still about 90% as strong as it is on the surface of Earth. What orbit actually means is that you’re moving so fast that the ground is falling away from you as fast as you fall towards it.
Essentially, orbiting is what happens when you aim at the ground and miss.
To do that, you need to go very fast horizontally, not vertically.
But you do still need to go up far enough that the atmosphere is thin and isn’t slowing you down.
And if you want to go very fast vertically and horizontally at the same time, what you get is an arc.
They are going to orbit. Orbit is a speed, not just an altitude (like space kind of is). They need to go around the earth very fast, and if they only went up, that wouldn’t happen.
If you want to learn more of this thing while haveing fun play KSP i learned a lot about rocket science from there.
Now since planet (Earth) is a globe and we know that for certain, to achieve ,,steadiness,, in space we have to travel x km/s in an orbital direction. And to achieve orbit we need to be fast enough to break gravity from pulling us back. So how we do it, its simple. Imagine having one line from Earth’s core to you when you go straight up you make it go up and again falling down, but if you go with curve / you make it spin around the globe makeing one big ring around the planet achieveing orbit.
And once we get in orbit we have same speed forever, to move that ring back and land on Earth we just go in opposite direction, so instead of extending the ring further by going in same direction we are shrinking it. Also in orbit its very cheap to change path and go to Moon for example it saves billions on fuel and mass of craft.
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