You Can’t Just Fly Up Into Space Willy-nilly. A Smart Space Tourist Understands How To Get There. The Ceo Of Spacex Explains Some Of The Science Behind His Stainless-steel Starship Rocket—which Might Just Carry You To Mars.
IN JANUARY, we ran an exclusive interview with Elon Musk on PopularMechanics .com, in which he explained, for the first time, his full thinking—and the complex engineering questions—behind his decision to construct SpaceX’s Starship rocket and booster with stainless steel. The previous design for the rocket (which was then known as the BFR) had called for carbon fiber, but Musk recalculated and went with steel due to its durability, cost-effectiveness, and ductility.
Here, in a continuation of that interview, Musk goes deep on what it takes to actually travel beyond orbit and into space. Also, it sounds like Mars will have a nice park.
Ryan D’Agostino: What don’t most future potential space tourists understand about the practicality of traveling to space?
Elon Musk: Some basic concepts about orbit and gravity, which are counterintuitive because they’re not what we experience. Like, a lot of people think if you go up high enough, gravity stops. This is not true. Earth’s gravitational reach is infinite. You could be at the other side of the universe— given enough time, if you have no relative velocity compared to the Earth, you will come right back to Earth.
The simple Newtonian formula for gravity is GMM over R squared—you know, gravitational constant times the two masses divided by the distance from the centroids. So if you were to go up 100 miles, you’re not changing the distance between you and the center of the Earth very much. The pull of gravity would seem the same to you. The reason there’s this thing called zero gravity, or microgravity—it’s really due to zooming around the Earth very fast. A rocket doesn’t go straight up. It does this arc. It only goes vertical briefly and then turns over and accelerates horizontal to the surface of the Earth.
This story is from the April 2019 edition of Popular Mechanics.
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This story is from the April 2019 edition of Popular Mechanics.
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