Launching big tubes of space fire is hard. I’m grateful to my favorite astronaut Don Pettit for explaining the physics of the rocket equation to me in simple terms that my biologist brain could handle 🤓
But just going to the Moon would require every rocket sent there to climb the Earth’s gravitational well. Would the benefit come from continuous missions where the rocket left off and returned to the Moon?
It takes four hours if you push at just 1g and do a turnover halfway and break at 1g. Putting things to perspective is 'tight. GL hf with the Artemis program. I want us to industrialize the moon A.S.A.P. Thanks. 📡🧙♂️🐺🌹🌚🌍 Love.
Perhaps, but what percent of even that one model (they make many models and have been doing so for many decades) plane's flights resulted in a crash? I mean, when they "grounded" them, every single one was flown to Seattle without incidence.
well gravity is not the limit either. because we can send things to space! while it may take lots of resources, we can do so many things to make it so we use less resources! however it would also take lots of resources to make those things. it would also take way more to get those things functioning. also i was the only person who disliked this post. i see a video about something called boob lights? just wanted to say that
"We've been to space! I can't even believe we have to do this!" I can't stop laughing...because science! I want a D.A.F.E. shirt. LOL 🤣🤣🤣🤣 (Edited for misquote)
@@dahawk8574 Yeah, he only started the current progressive movement. The one that's now the narrative in Washington. He's such a reject, stuck in the past.
Kerbin is 0.1 the size and about 0.01 the mass of Earth. So much easier for them to wing it for exactly the reasons talked about in the video ;) Of course, Realism Overhaul exists... The real hard mode for KSP
The bit starting at 0:38 was not entirely accurate. Joe points only to the CM (Command Module), but the CM, the SM (Service Module), and the LM (Lunar Module) all went to the moon. The CM and SM came back to earth (as did the LM ascent module for Apollo XIII). The SMs for every Apollo mission all returned to earth and burned up during re-entry. The graphic at 3:48 shows all these parts as part of the "1%", though.
This indicates that 99% of the mass was needed to get the final percent into a trans-lunar trajectory. The service module was sufficient to brake into lunar orbit and re-accelerate into a trans-Earth trajectory. I wonder what percent of mass was the command module?
khrdina, Joe's exact quote is "...to the Moon and back." We could extend to him the benefit of doubt and interpret his word "back" as meaning "returning safely BACK to the surface of the Earth". With that easy to make interpretation, it is perfectly accurate to state that the entire Saturn V accomplished the safe return to Earth of only the CM. Absolutely no other part of the rocket got back to Earth safely.
Good luck with that :-D Actually, if you could create an atmosphere on the moon and heat it, it would go a long way to make it inhabitable :-) For this you just need more gravity and a magnetic field. Simple really.
"If the only tool you have is a hammer every problem starts to look like a nail." With you, it's Global Warming. That's your hammer. Someones says, "Lovely soup but a bit hot." You say, "Just imagine how hot it's going to be with global warming." You must be a very boring person to live with. I'm guessing you're thinking, "But just imagine how boring I'd be when Global Warming starts."
@@MrStringybark Actually, I don't give a damn about global warming, since I build amateur solid-fuel rockets and I ride 2-stroke motorcycles. I was just making a joke, Karen
@@SirRandom First of all. Have you heard of Poe's Law? Some smart people are known to use aLtErNaTiNg CaPs to show sarcasm or satire. Don't worry none, we all realise it's new to you but you'll pick it up after a while. BTW. It's soooo cute you learnt a new word today, Ka-ren.
My first thought after watching this was: If the Earth was 10%-15% larger we couldn't have a space program, does that mean if the Moon wasn't knocked off of Earth by that meteor we would be too large for space travel? I suppose even if we weren't too large not having a moon would cause loads of other issues, but that was my first thought.
probably. elon musk has said that if the earth was just a bit smaller ssto would be feasible, and a bit larger and we would need a super heavy rocket to get a small load to orbit.
@@geohiekim8705 And yet Musk still doesn't seem to get that Mars' much smaller gravity well means it'll never be able to hold an atmosphere thick enough to be terraformed.
@@vituperation You don't seem to get that going to Mars is not about terraforming. It's about finding humanity a new home and a way to get there before the sun vaporises Earth...and Mars.
@@kirkc9643 that won't happen for a billion years. Our biggest problem right now is that we are slowly turning earth into Venus. There's only so much pollution and co2 the atmosphere can take before it turns into a runaway greenhouse effect. And there's no reversing it when that happens. At this rate, within a couple hundred years or less the temperature swings will be so bad that the oceans will boil away and life will be unsustainable on Earth.
@CL Melonshark I can't find the quote, but I do remember him saying it when ask why he was focused on Mars and not the Moon. He only switched to the moon when the US administration made it clear that is what they are willing to fund. So he'll have to go there to keep NASA grants flowing while getting to Mars on his own money.
@@RobOfTheNorth2001 oh so now he goes for the Moon. Well at least he is going for the Moon, but do recalled people criticizing me on what Elon Musk said about the Moon. I may not know Rocket science, but I was aware that the Moon is important for Space travel, and this video prove my critism.
I wonder what the next decade holds for us in terms of space exploration and discoveries. The concept of putting rockets on the moon is interesting no doubt.
I wonder when they might realize. Why research artificial gravity. When you can build a space ship around the moon. When earth is did and done for. Raid all the resources of the earth to build a death star.
Permanent bases (industrial-scale spacecraft manufacturing and/or industrial-scale rocket propellant synthesis) are a requirement for the Moon to save us any energy and/or time at all. If we don't have these things, then going there is a detour, not a shortcut. It would take more energy than going straight to a target from Earth since all of it still has to be lifted into orbit from Earth anyway. And establishing an industrial base like that is multiple decades out. So at the very least on the timeline this video has been disappointingly misleading.
8:10 I absolutely agree. I don't think humans would have ever made the push into space without a moon to sustain our curiosity or to have an achievable goal.
Great series of videos, thanks for these. One point in this one at about 6.5 minutes, the statement "if earth was 10 - 15% bigger, we would not be able to get off. More correctly, the statement should be "if the mass of earth..." For example, if the diameter of earth was larger, but the mass stayed the same, it would be easier to launch a rocket.
6:34 I like how you guys just casually bring up probably one of the most significant solutions to the Fermi Paradox that I have never heard anywhere else. "Super Earths" are considered to be far more hospitable to life because more gravity equals a denser atmosphere that can shield from solar radiation and cosmic debris. They also constitute a large fraction of the potentially habitable exoplanets we find. Therefore they're more likely candidates for life. And yet, with their larger gravity well, any civilization would have to lean more heavily on nuclear propulsion to launch even satellites with potentially disastrous consequences - from nuclear proliferation to accidental rocket detonations scattering fissile material. That's even if nuclear propulsion is enough to overcome the gravity of a planet 1.5-2x the size of Earth. They would also likely never be able to construct a space elevator given that it's barely possible under Earth's relatively smaller gravitational pull.
There was an old story about what ppl needed to discover America.. forgot its origin, but something like this: You need a carriage and 2 horses. Those horses need lots of food so you would need another carriage and 4 more horses, those 4 more horses need food too so.... Then they got to the beach and realized what they need is a boat..
now, I agree with you that moon rocks are cool, but would they continue to be cool if we had significant traffic going through the moon as an intermediate? to the average earthling? I mean, I'd personally still think they're the bees knees, but I can imagine the romance being found to be lacking for the average human
There are two parts to this video that are kinda disingenuous and pretty misleading. One, to launch from the Moon you still need to propel your spacecraft towards the Moon which means launching from Earth just the same as now. 2) Unless you already have industrial-scale manufacturing, storage, and refueling of rocket propellant established on the Moon this process requires MORE ENERGY than going straight to your destination from Earth. So unless we either have industrial-scale rocket manufacturing or industrial-scale rocket propellant synthesis on the Moon, going to the Moon only imposes additional cost and slows us down. And both of these things are multiple decades off.
If you Google "How much water is on the moon" you will find an article from airspacemag dot com that estimates between 100 million and a billion metric tons _at each pole._ Should be enough to reach Mars or the Asteroid belt, which all also have plenty of water in them.
@@kausardatta6821 even if it was 1% of that estimate (1million metric tons) and it takes about 1000tons to refuel a space shuttle that would be enough to fuel 1000 shuttles which is probably enough to get to mars and we know that mars has around 562 trillion tons of water which would be hard to run out of
6:35 Isn't this incorrect? Astronaut: "If you increase the size (radius) of a body the gravitational constant increases." Two things here, the gravitational constant is just that - a constant, it cant change. Secondly, when you increase the radius of a body the 'strength' of gravity actually decreases. As I remember correctly it follows the 1/r^2 law so by increasing radius you're decreases the value as you are dividing by a larger number. This is why black-holes have absolutely ludicrously strong gravitational fields because their mass is located within a point like piece of space with a very low radius relative to the mass. The large mass obviously plays a part but the radius is squared so it plays a much larger role. Think about a planet with the mass of earth spread out over the entire galaxy. Someone standing on the surface would likely be able to jump and achieve orbit velocity. Before anyone calls me out for backseat lecturing I would like to say this... This well educated and smart man clearly understands this but he may be explaining in a manner which is easier for casual viewers and is perhaps overlooking his scientific language. I do think its necessary to point out these differences especially because this is an educational video from an educational channel. It's good practise to straighten things up even if its just a post edit annotation.
Says the guy perpetuating literal _nonsense_ backed up by nothing but emotion and set against *physical proof* of said trips to space. Instead, he thinks there is a *WORLDWIDE* conspiracy between *THOUSANDS* even *MILLIONS* of scientists and politicians which is run *PERFECTLY* by our most efficient and least leaky of all organizations, the *GOVERNMENT* You can't make this kind of stupid up. He has to be a real person. Lmfao.
@@georgepatrick4339 Yeah, hilarious joke, not like anyone is going to read it and think they have support, right? You should look up Poe's law before you ever post stuff like this ever again without being more obvious or adding a /funny /s or something.
Well... yes, and no. I´m all for building stuff on the moon and expand into space. But. At the same time, I´m not blind enough to ignore all that stuff is _a lot_ of launches and years away. Like, you would have to build the equivalent of a small city on the moon before seeing any amount of lunar-produced propellant, and any return on investment is even farther away. In fact, I´m pretty sure that by the time we do that, the problem of cheaply putting payloads on LEO and staging from there will be mostly solved, 85% fuel on our rockets or not. And as a wise man once said, orbit is halfway to anywhere. In fact, any rockets going to the moon are already 90% of the way to anywhere already.
Well that's all well and good for the one rocket. The idea is that we build more rockets once we're there. Why would we just give up on the moon and build our 10% efficient rockets down here when we could have our 70% efficient rockets up there?
@@The_Jovian Well, the usual argument is that if you want to do X in space, you could spend your budget on building moon infrastructure, then do X cheaply. Or, you could have X done instead, expensively, but for less total money, and sooner. I think the first thing is to define X, anyhow, because right now everybody has a different idea of what X should be. In any case, all humans leaving Earth will have to, you know, leave Earth. So we won´t get rid of the need to launch stuff to LEO. So why don´t we just focus our efforts on doing _that_ sustainably (AKA, fully reusable rockets). Then we can build the infrastructure elsewhere to go further, only cheaply. After all, fuel is a tiny, _tiny_ fraction of a rocket´s cost.
Just stick my kid brother on the moon with all the Tex-Mex he can eat... come back a year later and GUARANTEED that little stinker has made you enough methane to fuel a whole FLEET of rockets to Mars!
Seem's like Elon Musk's idea is better. Unless your destination is the moon, just put your ship in a parking orbit around earth and then send up additional tanker ships to fill it up. You don't have to spend the extra travel time going to the moon and have it refueled there.
You still have to get people, cargo, and life support systems off of Earth no matter what. Rocket fuel on the moon and the moon's gravity doesn't end that problem. And once you escape Earth's orbit, your inertia keeps you going. The rocket doesn't need to push you all the way to Mars. Wouldn't it make more sense to use the moon's gravity to sling shot you to Mars so you can get there faster, rather than waste fuel escaping a second body?
The fact so much fuel is needed to launch such tiny vehicles into space is made ironic by the fact gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces.
Wow mind was blown at 6:43. If any of the moons origins theories are correct, that it once was apart of Earth, then the Moon reduced the Earth enough so that we could leave. It is almost like the Grandfather paradox. Without a moon we couldn't have gotten to the moon. Like if mind blown also.
I grew up in Huntsville Alabama, so I’ve kind of always had an idea just how massive the Saturn V rocket is. You can see it from halfway across town, and if you actually go to the space and rocket center, it’s unbelievably huge
Rocket equation? Who needs that? Just put on a few boosters on your rocket and your -unfortunate test subjects- kerbals should (hopefully) be able to make it. If not, just put on more boosters
Wait, so this means that we wouldn't be able to land on a super earth like the ones we've found so far and come back. Doesn't sound like a very good idea unless we find a way to beat the rocket equation itself.
why should we use millions and millions gallons of fuel to get the rocked to the moon when we can simply build *higly classified for profit* to get it to moon whitin seconds?
i know something you dont know and its the fact that you dont need to be smart to be brilliant. ill explain smart is something you get teached brilliant on the other hand is something that you are born whit
U say planets with just 10% more gravitational constant can't build a rocket which can live it's planet ? *WHAT IF* *WHAT IF* We use different fuel like , anti matter , or nuclear reaction ????????
After re-watching this video, I realized what felt kinda familiar and odd about it. I frequently watch the older IOTBS videos with my neices and nephews and after jumping from the older videos to this one, I realized something.. Joe is turning into Destin Sandlin! lol The format, the set, the contagious enthusiasm... all of it! I feel like I'm getting smarter every day and it's okay. ;D I think perhaps Destins "infectious enthusiasm" was more literal and he is slowly converting science lovers into his own small laminar flow loving nerd army that keep having their minds blown by wierd and innocuous and mundane phenomena like why does grass look like tiny swords? How is it possible to get a hair splinter? (It's real, look it up. I get them all the time from my dog. Somehow a hair stabs through your flesh deep enough to be very painful.. but HOW?! Destin... Help!) and other absolutely overlooked and unstudied non-questions. So let's devote more money and resources to questions that would make the 'It's Okay To Get Smarter Every Day' army proud; like How is Black (absorbs light) Gloss (reflects light) possible?
okay yes its brilliant. but you might still need to use rockets to get up to the moon with BOTH people AND resources to build the rocket launch bases AND resources for survival for the people that go to the moon to work/live. its still gonna be a big challenge
nuclear is too heavy and polluting. we are not at a limit, a new rocket fuel is being tested for the new rockets, methane. methane has a similar thrust to hydrogen but is more compact, liquid at lower temp, and uses more oxygen than fuel (hydrolox uses more hydrogen less oxygen) and is also cheaper. in the future we could even use atmospheric oxygen on take off and make the vehicle even lighter.
