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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It’s due to scale, and a little bit due to acceleration. For a small missile, it can be designed to accelerate at 10G+ because there’s nothing too sensitive in there. Orbital rockets typically shoot for around 3g because that’s what a human can take. For a small missile, it’s a few feet long. It looks really fast because of its size. The large orbital rockets are the size of large buildings. So even though it might be moving at 200kph by the time it clears the launch tower, it doesn’t look fast because it’s the size of a 15-story tall building; and that’s the slowest it’s accelerating because that’s when it has the most fuel and oxidizer on board.
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