why when the international space station is only 250miles away does it take at least 4 hours to get there?

Question

I’m going to be very disappointed if the rockets top out at 65mph.

In: Planetary Science

Answer 1

You can get there much faster if you’re cool rendezvousing at thousands of mph. Wouldn’t recommend.

Structural tolerances and safety considerations mean you want to bring your relative velocity down to something like 0.1-0.2mph. So you simultaneously need to get up to ~17500mph, get relatively close, match trajectory and speed extremely closely, and have your docking port meet theirs gently. This takes several maneuvers, and you’re not going to rush it because you have a handful of borderline irreplaceable astronauts, billions of dollars in tough to replace equipment and significant time invested into experiments.