From the videos I’ve seen online when a rocket lift’s off the rocket boosters separate from the capsule. What are they and why do they separate?
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Everything you bring to space has weight.
Weight which you need to push along with fuel.
If your fuel tanks are empty there is no reason to Carry that weight around and let your remaining precious fuel be wasted faster. **You are still pushing the whole rocket with less and less fuel.**
**So we throw the spent parts of a rocket off.**
That is btw why space x sometimes wont recover boosters. If you wanna get deeper into space you wont carry enough fuel to save those spent parts.. as saving the rocket parts needs more fuel. and why the standard was to waste rockets entirely because… u can get farther.
Not to mention saving boosters is just difficult in the first place
The solid rocket boosters separate once they are empty so that the remaining spacecraft can continue along its flight with less weight and more efficient use of the remaining thrust/acceleration.
The capsules that drop off contained spent fuel. No sense carrying the extra weight of the capsule/section any longer.
They are basically just engines and fuel.
Once the fuel is gone they separate to reduce weight and drag.
If you think about old world war 2 planes with external fuel tanks it’s the same thing. They use the fuel in the external tank then drop them because they no longer serve a purpose.
Everything you try to carry up to space adds weight and air resistance. Once a boosters fuel stage runs out they detach it so they don’t have to drag the empty part up with them.
The more stuff you try to accelerate up to orbital velocity the more fuel you need to lift it. But when you add more fuel you just made the rocket heavier so now you need to add even more fuel! Having stages and boosters that could detach solved the problem.
Other solutions including using things like nuclear bombs and/or accelerating more rapidly and/or launching from somewhere very high near the equator, like Mt.everest base camp or something.
The earth is spinning so launching from the equator adds earth’s rotational speed to your velocity, whereas launching from the north or south pole wouldn’t give you that extra bit.
There are a lot of factors to take into consideration when it comes to launching rockets and every tiny bit of efficiency makes a dramatic difference!
It’s very hard to get into orbit. You don’t want to take any more mass with you than you need to, so as you go you drop off bits that you no longer need.
Take SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for example. The first stage has 9 rocket engines and two large fuel tanks. Once the fuel is gone the tanks are just dead weight. Likewise, with all the weight of that fuel gone, you don’t need all nine engines. So drop off that stage, about two minutes into the flight.
The second stage has two smaller fuel tanks and just one rocket engine, which is more than enough for what it has to push the rest of the way to orbit.
To add to what everyone else has said…
The goal of rockets is to accelerate a payload in a specific direction to a specific relative velocity.
Once a rocket has accelerated the payload as much as it can towards that goal, there’s no reason for it to stick around.
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