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From the planetary frame of reference, the ship's speed will appear to be limited by the speed of light — it can approach the speed of light, but never reach it. If a ship is using 1 g constant acceleration, it will appear to get near the speed of light in about a year, and have traveled about half a light year in distance. For the middle of ...
A space vehicle's flight is determined by application of Newton's second law of motion: =, where F is the vector sum of all forces exerted on the vehicle, m is its current mass, and a is the acceleration vector, the instantaneous rate of change of velocity (v), which in turn is the instantaneous rate of change of displacement.
Delta-v (also known as "change in velocity"), symbolized as and pronounced /dɛltə viː/, as used in spacecraft flight dynamics, is a measure of the impulse per unit of spacecraft mass that is needed to perform a maneuver such as launching from or landing on a planet or moon, or an in-space orbital maneuver.
Flight envelope is one of a number of related terms that are used in a similar fashion. It is perhaps the most common term because it is the oldest, first being used in the early days of test flight. It is closely related to more modern terms known as extra power and a doghouse plot which are different ways of describing the flight envelope of ...
When stacked and fully fueled, Starship has a mass of approximately 5,000 t (11,000,000 lb), [c] a diameter of 9 m (30 ft) [16] and a height of 121.3 m (398 ft). [17] The rocket has been designed with the goal of being fully reusable to reduce launch costs; [18] it consists of the Super Heavy booster and the Starship upper stage [19] which are powered by Raptor and Raptor Vacuum engines.
Calculations imply that light will go faster in such a vacuum by a minuscule amount: a photon traveling between two plates that are 1 micrometer apart would increase the photon's speed by only about one part in 10 36. [44] Accordingly, there has as yet been no experimental verification of the prediction.
While the SS2 achieved a speed of Mach 1.2 (920 mph), [41] this was less than half the 2,000 mph speed predicted by Richard Branson. SpaceShipTwo's second supersonic flight achieved a speed of 1,100 mph for 20 seconds; while this was an improvement, it fell far short of the 2,500 mph for 70 seconds required to carry six passengers into space.
An orbital spaceflight (or orbital flight) is a spaceflight in which a spacecraft is placed on a trajectory where it could remain in space for at least one orbit. To do this around the Earth , it must be on a free trajectory which has an altitude at perigee (altitude at closest approach) around 80 kilometers (50 mi); this is the boundary of ...