You see video of rockets with munitions in them like surface -to-air and plane mounted rockets and they seem to move so quick. Why do these massive rockets seem to move slow? Is it payload? Do they speed up as they reach the stratosphere?
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One part of it is something called parallax: We judge the speed of something that moves across our field of vision by how much of an angle it takes to rotate if we were trying to keep our eyes pointed directly at it. When something is far away, it takes a lot of distance to go through a small angle, but when something’s closer, it doesn’t take as much (compare a plane high in the sky to a fly in front of your face). The bigger the rocket, the further away the cameras are (for safety), which means the rocket is going to look like it’s moving slower.
Another part of this is that when you compare a space rocket launch to munitions, it’s very likely that the munitions are accelerating faster than the rocket in the very beginning. At launch the rocket is heaviest, and the acceleration from the thrusters might only be a couple times bigger than gravity. The rocket eventually reaches a higher speed because it accelerates for longer.
You also don’t usually want the rocket to accelerate too fast because whatever you’re launching to space is usually too delicate to withstand extreme accelerations (even if it’s not humans, satellites and space probes are generally built to be light, which means they have to compromise on robustness).
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