why do space rockets take off from a upright position instead of taking off of a runway like a plane, reach 40,000 ft and entering space from there.
In: Engineering
How would a rocket fly horizontally? You’d have to add wings to create lift. At that point you’d basically have a rocket powered plane. The great thing about planes is that (due to a good lift-to-drag ratio) they need relatively little forward thrust to stay in the air and gain altitude. Apparently it’s easier/cheaper for a rocket to just increase thrust and launch vertically. There are some rockets which are launched from planes but that’s only really feasible for small rockets and adds complexity for relatively little gain (the great thing about launching a rocket from a plane is actually that you can choose where you launch the rocket, e.g. exactly at the equator, over the ocean, instead of having to build a launch pad there).
For a rocket to reach *orbit* the hard part is gaining enough *horizontal* velocity (about 7.8 km/s (28,080 km/h) for low Earth orbit). To go to space you just have to go up by ≥100km, which is not *that* hard. To quote xkcd: “getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there.” https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
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