If you're anything like me, you've probably
dabbled with the idea of boarding a rocket
and leaving this hellhole of a planet behind
you to go live on Mars, or somewhere equally
isolated.
But how does a rocket actually work?
It all comes down to a little something called
the conservation of momentum.
If you take any group of things and and up
all of their momentum, that number cannot
change.
So, if one of those things gains momentum,
the others have to lose it.
But, "Martin," I hear you cry, "What is momentum?"
To which I reply, "How do you know my name,
why can I hear you - are you in my house?"
and "Please get out".
If you take how heavy something is and multiply
that by how fast it's going, you get its momentum.
Now unless you live in a hole, you probably
know that a rocket works by farting out fire.
If we consider the rocket and its fuel as
our system, then to make the rocket increase
its speed, we need to increase its momentum.
To increase its momentum, we need to decrease
the momentum of the fuel, or increase the
fuel's momentum in the opposite direction.
But rockets are heavy, which means we need
a big change in momentum to get it moving
even just a little bit.
So, we shoot the fuel out as fast as we can
to get the biggest possible change in momentum.
How?
By turning the fuel into an explosion - that
trail of fire you see behind the rocket.
Now this may be sufficient for a small rocket.
For example (in order of destructive power)
a firework, a missile, or a bottle rocket,
but for big-ass rockets like the Saturn V,
which - if you believe mainstream media - took
people to the moon and back, you also have
to consider the weight of the fuel itself.
When the rocket sits on the launch pad, it
is full of fuel, which makes the whole rocket
heavier.
So you need more fuel, which makes it heavier,
and so on.
One way of mitigating this effect is by splitting
the rocket into stages.
Once the rocket is already moving and you've
used up a bunch of fuel, you can ditch the
bottom part of the rocket with its empty fuel
tank, and decrease the total mass, making
the rest of the rocket more efficient.
Now as you might expect, building one of these
things and making sure that the continuous
explosions go off at the right time and in
the right direction without destroying the
whole thing, is quite a challenge.
After all, it is rocket science.
Nevertheless, engineers are getting better
at it all the time as technological advances
are made.
Sadly, interplanetary rockets are expensive,
and by the time they become cheap enough for
a YouTuber to own, Mars will probably be full
of people anyway.
So I guess I'll just have to live in my bedroom
like everyone else.
If you enjoyed watching this video, you could
consider doing this, or this,
or this, or this.
These will boost my self-esteem which will
in turn entice to me to make more things like
this.
