Do you want to learn about bending computers and boxes that make clothes smell better and sky boats with turning wings? This exponential increase is the central problem of rocketry: The fuel required to increase your speed by one km/s multiplies your weight by about 1.4. More details. It's a little less if you're in the higher region of low Earth orbit. But our rockets kept exploding This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). If you want to slow all the way down to zero—and drop gently into the atmosphere—the fuel requirements multiply your weight by 15 again. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Barring a massive reduction in the population, is launching the whole human race into space physically possible? the International Space Station could cross the length of the field before the bullet traveled 10 yards. More details. SLS, which stands for Space Launch System, is the new launch program being designed by NASA to replace the retired Space Shuttle launch system. What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. The comic's tagline describes it as "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language". [4] It's a little less if you're in the higher region of low Earth orbit. As usual with his appearances, Black Hat is causing trouble. However, the steak, since it’s dropped from a standstill, isn’t moving nearly as fast as an object re-entering from orbit. The steak reaches a top speed of Mach 6, and the outer surface may even get pleasantly seared. The Space Station hasn't escaped Earth's gravity at all; it's experiencing about 90% the pull that we feel on the surface. Explanation []. The problem is staying there. Black Hat Man, offscreen: When we first captured von Braun and his team, we had our engineers interview them, then *we* built the rockets. Space is about 100 kilometers away. [[The same scientist in front of a spectacularly exploding rocket]] There are some good apps and online tools to help you spot the station, along with other neat satellites. [5]This exponential increase is the central problem of rocketry: The fuel required to increase your speed by one km/s multiplies your weight by about 1.4. If you make a building too tall, the whole thing gets taken up by elevators and there's no space for regular rooms. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). This comic is a diagram of the Saturn V rocket, "S… Maybe you can think of a way to get people to their floors without having too many elevators. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Finally, rockets that improve on the ones we had 40 years ago. The speed you need to stay in orbit is about 8 kilometers per second. But getting to space is easy. This comic is an illustration (albeit to a comical degree) of the principle that given the appropriate vocabulary, any technical concept should be understandable to a lay audience. can climb at over a meter per second in championship competition. suppose you started playing the 1988 song by The Proclaimers, I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles). More details.. To avoid falling back into the atmosphere, you have to go sideways really, really fast. Gravity in low Earth orbit is almost as strong as gravity on the surface. This leads us to the central problem of getting into orbit: Reaching orbital speed takes much more fuel than reaching orbital height. More details. To avoid falling back into the atmosphere, you have to go sideways really, really fast. The xkcd Time - At Your Own Pace logo: The Eye Of Providence with a clock instead of the eye in the upper part of the pyramid and the text "at your own pace" in the lower part of the pyramid. If you drop the steak from 250 kilometers, things start to heat up. It's hard to get to orbit because you have to go so fast. [[The Saturn V gracefully arcing across the night sky]] ...Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This type of play is legal in Australian rules football. It may approach the Moon; enter interplanetary space; flyby, orbit, or land on other planetary bodies; or approach interstellar space. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Our Cessna 172 isn’t up to the challenge. In 1428: Move Fast and Break Things driving a Mars rover is one of the jobs Cueball has lost. In this scatter plot Randall plots the speed of several vehicles (including people on foot for "normal sports") and how disastrous a crash would be. Launched from 1 km, it doesn’tbuild up enough speed to pull out of a dive, and plows into the Martianterrain at over 60 m/s (135 mph). You can read a brief introduction about this wiki at explain xkcd.Feel free to sign up for an account and contribute to the wiki! The ISS moves so quickly that if you fired a rifle bullet from one end of a football field,[7]Either kind. If dropped from four or fivekilometers, it could gain enough speed to pull up into a glide—at overhalf the speed of sound. Orbital rockets are much faster because getting to space is mainly a problem of going as fast as possible. Gravity in low Earth orbit is almost as strong as gravity on the surface. Today, I'm excited to announce that I'm publishing a collection of large-format (9"x13") Up Goer Five-style blueprints. Do you want to go to space? This means that if an astronaut on the ISS listens to I'm Gonna Be, in the time between the first beat of the song and the final lines ... ... they will have traveled just about exactly 1,000 miles. the fastest plane. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). People can climb poles pretty fast. My favorite is. Tuesday, xkcd’s What-If mentioned the story of a manhole cover that may have gone into space before Sputnik: A brief story: The official record for fastest manmade object is the Helios 2 probe, which reached about 70 km/s in a close swing around the Sun. Date/Time of Last Update: Thu Mar 18 12:00:27 2021 UTC ********** HEALTH ********** return to top This Fitness Band Is for Hardcore Athletes Only Tue, 16 Mar 2021 11:00:00 +0000 T In those 90 minutes, it's circled the entire world. Make sure to remember to steer up and not down, or you will have a bad time. Person 1: That's a *terrible* lesson. A space probe is an unmanned robotic spacecraft that leaves Earth orbit and explores space.. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Black Hat Man: Then I guess you should get a Nazi to come up with a better one. If you're in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea. It's an idea I've touched on in other articles, but today I want to focus on it specifically: The reason it's hard to get to orbit isn't that space is high up. News that matters, fast. Using song beats to help measure the passage of time is a technique also used in CPR training, where the song "Stayin' Alive" is used to . is easy. The clock is animated and shows the current time. The interval between the start and the end of I'm Gonna Be is 3 minutes and 30 seconds,[10]Based on timing from the official Youtube video and the ISS is moving is 7.66 km/s. Munroe states on the comic's website that the name of the comic is not an initialism but "just a … The book is full of detailed diagrams of interesting objects, along with explanations of what… My favorite is ISS Detector, but if you Google you can find lots of others. How quickly would the ocean's drain if a circular portal 10 meters in radius leading into space was created at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in the ocean? Since most of the jargon used in rocket science is not among the most commonly used words in everyday life, Randallhas challenged himself to "translate" the blueprints for the Saturn Five rocket using only the one thousand most commonly-used words in the English language. The Space Station hasn't escaped Earth's gravity at all; it's experiencing about 90% the pull that we feel on the surface. Would it negate the need for a heat shield? The caller, who didn’t identify himself, wanted to know whether they had copies of the newly published Real Fast Food by Nigel Slater. I think the reason for a lot of confusion about these issues is that when astronauts are in orbit, it doesn't seem like they're moving that fast; they look like they're drifting slowly over a blue marble. xkcd, sometimes styled XKCD, is a webcomic created in 2005 by American author Randall Munroe. [[von Braun interviewed by a scientist while under guard]] A while ago, I posted the comic Up Goer Five, an annotated blueprint of the Saturn V rocket with all the parts described using only the thousand most common English words. Only a fraction of a rocket's energy is used to lift up out of the atmosphere; the vast majority of it is used to gain orbital (sideways) speed. Maybe you could make a giant elevator that takes up 10 floors. Holy crap lots of space There is a lot of nearly empty space between galaxies. You have to actually put them in charge. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). [8]This type of play is legal in Australian rules football. On the Moon, gravity is much weaker, so it will probably be easier to climb. Person 1, offscreen: What? Explanation []. Only a fraction of a rocket's energy is used to lift up out of the atmosphere; the vast majority of it is used to gain orbital (sideways) speed. qualifiers: 71.43 space travel, 10.71 space travel, 9.29 nasa At Last, First Light for the James Webb Space Telescope Thu, 07 Jan 2021 16:00:00 GMT The most ambitious space instrument ever will let us see back almost to the big bang Match ID: 3 Score: 90.00 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 2 days qualifiers: 65.00 nasa, 25.00 mit When you look at the sky near sunset, you can sometimes see the ISS go past ... and then, 90 minutes later, see it go past again. [5] Of course there are championship competitions. Specifically, low Earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is and where the shuttles could go. World-record pole climbers [4] Of course there's a world record for pole climbing. More details. Most prominently the Curiosity rover is explained in the Red world space car section (the fourth explanation). Let's imagine what it would look like if you were speed-walking across the Earth's surface at 8 km/s. [4]It's a little less if you're in the higher region of low Earth orbit. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. But lifting people into space is hard. The space agency has long relied on kid-friendly mascots to make the case for space Match ID: 0 Score: 95.00 source: spectrum.ieee.org age: 468 days qualifiers: 71.43 space travel, 10.71 space travel, 9.29 nasa, 3.57 mit Humanity’s Lunar Habitats Thu, 11 Jul 2019 15:30:00 GMT A look at current plans to return to the moon…and stay there Or you could make fast elevators that work like roller coasters. Reaching orbital speed is hard enough; reaching to orbital speed while carrying enough fuel to slow back down would be completely impractical. Happy scrolling! To get into orbit, you need to increase your speed to 8 km/s, which means you'll need a lot of fuel: $1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\approx 15$ times the original weight of your ship. ; They are featured prominently in several xkcd comics, several times referenced in relation to a specific event, like a landing or flyby. In the time it took to sing the first line of the chorus, you could walk from the Statue of Liberty all the way to the Bronx: It would take you about two lines of the chorus (16 beats of the song) to cross the English Channel between London and France. “That’s when I knew it was all going to be all right.” It holds the record for the fastest trip from New York to London. The punchline is that space rockets travel so dangerously fast, and crashes are so utterly catastrophic, that it pushes literally every other kind of crash to the "slow and safe" corner by comparison. First, let's get a few things out of the way: In real life, we can't put a metal pole between the Earth and the Moon. The answers to these questions all hinge on the same idea. Black Hat Man: Are we getting Nazis to build those ones too? Black Hat Man: "If you want something done right ,learning from the Nazis isn't enough. Person 1: I'm.. not sure what lesson to take from that. Black Hat Man, narrating: Eventually we gave up and had the German teams do it, and they built us the Saturn V moon rocket. It's not, like, something you could do in your car, but it's not a huge challenge. Person 1: Check out the SLS - 130 tons to orbit. [6]There are some good apps and online tools to help you spot the station, along with other neat satellites. [1]For one, someone at NASA would probably yell at us. You could get a person to space with a small sounding rocket the size of a telephone pole. There are a bunch of science fiction movies where, because of pollution, overpopulation, or nuclear war, humanity abandons Earth. 250 kilometers puts us in the range of low earth orbit. {{Title text: The SLS head engineer plans to invite Shania Twain to stand under the completed prototype, then tell her, 'I don't expect you to date me just because I'm a rocket scientist, but you've gotta admit--this is pretty fucking impressive. '}}, xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 3±1 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). “And Clarissa just enthused down the phone at me, told me it was a marvellous book,” Nigel says now. The problem is staying there. 9.46 ×10 21 m One million light years 2.38 ×10 21 m Cat on a keyboard in space: An internet meme featuring a picture of a cat sitting on a musical keyboard, superimposed on an image of space. But 8 km/s is blisteringly fast. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. ...is about 8 kilometers per second. To get into orbit, you need to increase your speed to 8 km/s, which means you'll need a lot of fuel: $1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\times1.4\approx 15$ times the original weight of your ship.Using a rocket to slow down carries the same problem: Every 1 km/s decrease in speed multiplies your starting mass by that same factor of 1.4. The song's length leads to an odd coincidence. To get a better sense of the pace at which you're traveling, let's use the beat of a song to mark the passage of time. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. The X-15 aircraft reached space[2]The X-15 reached 100 km on two occasions, both when flown by Joe Walker. The "Star Wars" rebels may have destroyed the Death Star, but the sinister satellite still managed to destroy the rebel base — and the moon of Endor — in the end. We need explanations for comics, characters, themes and everything in between.If it is referenced in an xkcd web comic, it should be here.. That's far away—I wouldn't want to climb a ladder to get there—but it isn't that far away. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. More details.. Good luck, have news. [2] The X-15 rocket plane, was about twice as fast as the SR-71, and is the only aircraft to fly up to space. But getting to space is easy. Getting to space[1]Specifically, low Earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is and where the shuttles could go. More details. More details. This work is licensed under a just by going fast and then steering up. [3]Make sure to remember to steer up and not down, or you will have a bad time. The X-15 reached 100 km on two occasions, both when flown by Joe Walker. These outrageous fuel requirements are why every spacecraft entering an atmosphere has braked using a heat shield instead of rockets—slamming into the air is the most practical way to slow down. Is it possible for a spacecraft to control its reentry in such a way that it avoids the atmospheric compression and thus would not require the expensive (and relatively fragile) heat shield on the outside? More details.. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Could a (small) rocket (with payload) be lifted to a high point in the atmosphere where it would only need a small rocket to get to escape velocity? How would the Earth change as the water is being drained? Getting a ship up to 8 km/s takes a lot of booster rockets. [9]Using song beats to help measure the passage of time is a technique also used in CPR training, where the song "Stayin' Alive" is used to . (And to answer Brian's question, the Curiosity rover was no exception to this; although it used small rockets to hover when it was near the surface, it first used air-braking to shed the majority of its speed.). That song is about 131.9 beats per minute, so imagine that with every beat of the song, you move forward more than two miles. In the first frame, Cueball is showing Black Hat something about the SLS, possibly a video on his phone or other portable electronic device.