why do rockets take so long to get to the ISS?

269 viewsOtherPlanetary Science

The ISS is around 400km above us. A rocket needs a speed of at least 8km per second to get to space. If we cut out the acceleration part it could in theory reach the ISS in around 50 seconds. Even if we factor in the acceleration part etc. it should still be very quick up there. Yet the fastest possible time to get to the ISS is 4 hours. That would be an average speed of 100Km/h which is way slower than the speed of the rocket after a few seconds. Why the long journey?

In: Planetary Science

18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m sure you could shoot a missile at the ISS and have it reach it that fast, but when it got there the two objects would be flying perpendicular to each other at like 30K miles an hour.

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