Why is it so difficult and costly to build a rocket which escapes Earths atmosphere?

Question

The rocket need not carry people or any payload. It only needa to be big enough to escape earths atmosphere. Why is this so hard to accomplish?

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Answer 1

> escapes Earths atmosphere?

Not really the hardest part. You can pile explosives under a manhole cover to do that (in fact they once did yeet one using a nuke but it vaporized due to heating before it left the atmosphere). Staying up in space is the asstastic part – you need to go fast enough sideways that you keep missing the entire planet as you fall. For low Earth orbit that’s about 7.5km/s-ish, so 27000km/h. You need a shitton of fuel to accelerate that much.