I’m going to be very disappointed if the rockets top out at 65mph.
In: Planetary Science
That’s not how it works.
The ISS is moving at about 7 km/s around the Earth.
If you just go straight up to the ISS you’ll hit it with about 7 km/s of velocity.
You need to match its trajectory and position.
There are lots of ways to do this, just the most efficient way is to get into a lower orbit (lower means faster and vice versa) than your target and wait until the perfect timing to make a burn and raise your orbit such that when you reach the apex of your trajectory, your in more or less the same position as your target while having a small relative velocity which you then cancel out when your nearby.
You can minimize the time you’re waiting, by launching when the target is overhead, but the ISS is in what’s called an inclined orbit meaning that its orbit is at an angle relative to the equator.
In simple terms, this means that you must launch when the trajectory is overhead, otherwise your trajectory won’t line up with the target’s. However, this means that, in practice, you only get one chance per day since the Earth is turning while the trajectory stays in place.
Since you only get one chance per day, you can’t really be picky about the position of the ISS meaning that the process I described earlier takes significantly longer.
If the ISS and the launch site were on the equator you could launch whenever you want since the ISS’s trajectory is always overhead and you could theoretically get there in a matter of minutes if you time it right and are okay with doing things inefficiently.
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