Why do we have to fly rockets straight up and out of the atmosphere? Why can’t we fly a ship like a plane and just go higher and higher and higher, then rocket booster out past the exosphere. I know the air is thin way up there, so at the highest, tilt upwards and rocket boost
In: Engineering
Getting to orbit is the easy part of a launch, it’s staying in orbit that’s hard.
To do that you need to go really really fast to the side.
For low earth orbit you need to be going at **7.8 km per SECOND**.
For comparison, the SR-71 is the fastest jet plane ever made, it took insane amounts of engineering to get the plane’s outsides to survive the kind of forces that its speed through the atmosphere was putting it through.
That speed was about **1** km/s
It was spending so much energy fighting against the atmosphere slowing it down, which was also heating up the aircraft and putting stress on the hull.
So rather than fighting the atmosphere, they boost past it and start going sideways after they’re out of the vast majority of it.
Furthermore, the SR-71 was operating at the edge of how high jet planes can possibly work at.
About 25 km up.
The minimum line for space is 100km up.
Low Earth Orbit is usually 200km up.
TL:DR even the best jets only work at a tiny fraction of what space ships need to work at.
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