Many associate the idea of the giant leap of mankind with the small step that "Neil Armstrong" made on the moon, while NASA astronauts and their chemical engineers disagree with it, as well as an astronaut "Donald Petit," and the latter says that the revolution actually took place much closer to Earth.
He wrote in the year 2012: “The first step on the moon’s surface was not the giant leap in human history, but rather the reach of Earth’s orbit.”
Achieving the first step in reaching an orbit 400 kilometers from Earth requires half the total energy needed to reach Mars.
The distance between the Earth and the Moon is simple compared to the distance that we need to travel to reach the Earth's orbit.
The cost of the first step is mortgaged by the amount of gravitational force.
Physicists believe that saving one penny of the total cost depends on Earth's attempts to forcefully return your spacecraft to its orbit.
The Earth’s gravity tightens its grip on everything that comes to the surface of the Earth, which means it needs to get rid of 80-90% of the current missile’s mass by burning materials that generate energy to lift the missile into space. According to Petit, this means that its stability will be low and shaky and that this will leave no room for the transport of the astronauts, their food and their equipment.
Despite these faults, we are lucky.
“If the Earth’s radius was greater than it is now at a certain rate, we would not be able to manufacture any missile that could launch into space,” Petit says.
Petit began calculating, using the Tsiolkovsky missile equation, to determine this ratio.
Suppose a missile design with a 96% propulsion material and a 4% missile mass is the practical limit for vehicle launch engineering.
With a choice of hydrogen and oxygen mixture, the most active and effective driving chemical that can be used in missile engines.
By applying these numbers to the Tsiolkovsky missile equation, we can convert the product of the escape velocity into a planetary radius.
According to this equation, the radius of the planet will be about 9,680 km (the radius of the Earth is 6670).
If the diameter of our planet is greater than its current size by 50% - while maintaining the same density - we will not be able to invade space, at least not by using missiles.
Petit’s intellectual experience confirms several points. The first is that in this case, no current space transportation technology will succeed and will not be as efficient as the missiles currently in use, and we must devise modern technologies that can overcome the forces of gravity.
Several suggestions were made for such science fiction-inspired techniques, some of which were tested, while others were successful.
The second point is to consider establishing a launch base on the moon as an intuitive idea, as the rate of escape velocity on the moon is about 21.3% of the rate of escape velocity on Earth.
While launching a missile from Earth requires a lot of fuss and preparations, the launch from the moon still lacks many equipments.
Although the creation of a base on the moon similar to the base of "Cape Canaveral" is a distant matter, it is achievable with the development of 3D printing techniques as well as the processing of raw materials.
To achieve this goal, we need to extract most of the material from the moon or nearby space bodies such as asteroids and comets.
That is, we can use the moon to act as a gas station that treats its stock of icy water to convert it into bursting energy of oxygen and hydrogen.
That is, the earth - as Petit puts it - holds its grip on humanity. Our conquests into space managed to bypass this grip, and the possibility exists that they will finally be freed.
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