Untitled Document

Ever wonder: how that giant flame generates force? Or if you could simply build a huge fire underneath the shuttle to make it fly? Well it turns out that the rocket idea stem from one of newton's revelations. His second law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well, in this case the combustion is the action that excites the oxidized fuel particles away from the shuttle. The little particles exert the same amount of force on the shuttle as it did on them. This reaction force is the is what blasts the shuttle away. A giant fire underneath the shuttle would simply heat up the ship because the rocket would not be sending anything away to push back on it. One could also look at this situation as a conservation of momentum situation. The momentum of the rocket fuel system is zero relative to Earth's surface before the launch. After the launch the momentums of the ship and the fuel are equal and opposite. The fuel is going much faster but actually this is because the ship is pulling earth along with it (by a small amount) because of the gravitational pull between the rocket and the Earth. Another, more familiar way to think of it is that the reaction force has to overcome the downward force of gravity on the shuttle.

Source Picture F

Space Travel

More Sauce

Propulsion Types: There are two different kinds of fueling systems for rockets. In both, for spacecrafts, there are two main ingredients: the fuel, and some oxygen. The reason that the space rockets need the oxygen in the mix is that oxygen is needed for the combustion process and, as most of us know, it is not in space.

Liquid injected fueling systems for rockets:

Source Pictures I

Solid fuel rocket systems:

As shown above the two types of rocket fueling systems are the solid premixed solution fuel system and the liquid component fuel system. There are apparently strengths and weaknesses to both systems. The solid mixed system is very reliable. There are two weaknesses to the solid rocket fuel system. The first weakness is that the length of the burn created by the rocket can only be controlled by the amount of fuel in the rocket. This is because there is no real affective way to stop the solid mixture from oxidizing once it has been ignited. The other weakness is discussed further down this page. The liquid fuel system has the ability to stop pumping the components into the blast chamber; the combustion cannot travel up the tubes to the tanks because in each tube is only half of what the flame needs to burn. This allows for a more controlled situation. The downfall of the liquid fuel system is that the liquid substances, particularly the oxygen, are very difficult to store because they need extremely precise temperatures and pressures to be contained.

weakness of the solid fuel rocket. Because it is a solid, it has the ability

in a perpendicular fashion from the still cool (relatively) fuel as shown to