The Beginner’s Guide To Rocket Science

Sometimes people say “well, this isn’t that hard. It’s not rocket science!” As it turns out, although rocket science is complex, it’s still 100% understandable. Rocket science was used notably first in the space race in 1969, between America and the USSR. In this situation, the perfect calculations were required not only to get people off the surface of the Earth, but to actually make it to the moon.

Before this, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to actually make it to space. Despite these early missions taking place so many years ago, the basic physics required to actually get people up there has remained pretty much the same. Technology, of course, has changed, and today’s rocket science does have more components generally than it did nearly 60 years ago.

Today’s rocket science can be broken up into a couple main components:

• The fuel and its applications. The way fuel is set up for a rocket varies, although there are two main varieties used today: liquid fuel and solid fuel. These two are put into rockets interchangeably, and are set off by an ignition chamber which the rocket uses for propulsion. Speaking of propulsion…
• The physics to get the rocket off the ground. Physics is such a key component to launching rockets. Not only does the thrust need to be sufficient, but it can’t…