Why is space travel always 'horizontal'?

Question

When NASA or ESA or the bolsheviks go into space they always go horizontally across our solar system. Why don't they go 'up' or 'down', surely exploration involves venturing to areas that have been untouched?

Answer 1

Almost all the matter in the solar system is concentrated in a plane, called the ecliptic. There simply isn't much to see if you go much above or below that plane, except for a handful of odd asteroids. You don't explore areas where there's nothing to explore, right?

Answer 2

I could be wrong in my reasoning but this is why I think all mission are horizontally planned referenced from the earth and venturing out to the planets and not going up to the north celestial pole.

The FUEL required for a vertical flight toward the north celestial pole would be a lot more.

As an example, when NASA launches the shuttle they launch always in the eastern direction, the same direction in which the Earth is spinning, because the shuttle gets a boost from the speed of the Earth rotating on its axis. If you launch West you have to subtract the speed of the rotation of the Earth! This saves a lot of fuel if you launch west the shuttle might not make it!

When in orbit the shuttle speed is about 7-8km / second, referenced to the EARTH, but the shuttles speed referenced to the Sun is more than 66,000 miles per hour because that is the speed of the Earth around the Sun. Thus it makes sense to go horizontal and not vertical. Your vertical speed is very small and your horizontal speed is very large so it makes sense to go horizontal towards the outer or inner planets, Right? Besides, most matter is in the plane of the solar system so not much use going to the north celestial pole!

In space there is no such thing as up, down, left and right all the reference above are to the Earth and Sun.

Answer 3

By "horizontal" I understand that you mean the spaceship moves more or less in the plane defined by the orbits of the planets around the Sun.

The purpose of space research at the time being is to explore our solar system. A racket launched perpendicular to the solar system plane would move millions of years without any concrete results.

On the other side when the ship moves along the solar system plane it can use gravitational fields of planets to gain thrust by flying near to them.

Answer 4

There has been some mission outside of the plane of the ecliptic. There is a probe that was meant to orbit the sun going over its polar region (Ulysses; see link) to image and study them.

That said, most planets and orbiting bodies in the solar system are essentially in the plane of the ecliptic, there is very little of interest in the other directions. Further, to change the orbital plane, massive amount of propellant is needed as one has to stop going "this way" (in the plane of the ecliptic) and go that way instead (in a different plane). In space, this calls for fuel in both cases as velocity in a plane cannot be transferred into another perpendicular plane.

Answer 5

I think what he is asking is why exploratory probes are always sent in the same plane as the planets (i.e. the plane of our Solar System). The answer to this is that this is where most of the interesting 'stuff' is. All the planets orbit pretty much in this plane as do most of the asteroids. Most scientific exploration of the solar system naturally centres around looking at the planets. It is also much harder to send probes 'out of the plane' because it is harder to use the planets for gravity assisted accelaration (as a 'slingshot').

Answer 6

We send things in the directions that the planets are orbiting (the plane of the eliptic), because ... well, that's where the planets are. So that's where you want to spend your limited exploration money. Our telescopes tell us that there isn't that much to explore in the "up" direction (off the eliptic plane).

That said, the Ulysses probe was launched to go into an orbit 80 degrees out of the elliptic plane. This was to study the sun from angles over the two poles.

Answer 7

the sun has dictated the way our solar system is shaped hence the planets being in a horizontal alingnment there is no point in going up or down because we havent the tec to go far enough in those reigions to make it worth it when we can reproduce anti-matter at an efficient rate then its time for up and down .But by the way good question. RESPECT !!!

Answer 8

You are partially right. Some of space landings are also perpendicular to our solar sistem plane (which is only seemed to be a plane). The reason is that the velocity of Earth rotatin and revolution can help in landing off. Thats why
Cape Caneveral is on the south part of the USA, also Baykonur and also French Guajana for european rockets.

Answer 9

All the bodies had gravity, but it acted only on the rocket ship, and only the locally strongest-attracting body acted on the ship. In the simulation, the internal origin for the coordinate system of the computation was at the center of this strongest attractor. This was important for keeping some vague numerical stability in the calculations (with at best single-precision, software floating-point), but did lead to some anomalies.

For example, it turned out that the gravity of Mars (with the usual inverse-square formula) is dominates that of Phobos until you get below the surface of Phobos. So landing on Phobos was strange-- you sort of floated through its surface, then, when it became strongest, you snapped back to the surface.

For controls, there were several buttons: jet forward, jet back, turn left, turn right; go up scale on the display, go down scale. The acceleration of the ship was fixed, but it scaled with the display scale--it was thus fixed in terms of pixels/sec/sec. Normally the ship was in the center of the screen and always pointed up; the display showed the plan view of the solar system, so that the "rotate" controls rotated the solar system around you on the display.

No relativity; scale up enough and you travel to Pluto in a few seconds. But don't scale up too much, or you might not find the Solar System again without restarting.

The object of the game was simply to fly around, get into orbits, land. "Land" meant to cross the surface with a small enough speed.

Playing with orbits was fun; how you accelerate to change the size of the orbit and circularize it isn't very intuitive. One of the variations was to change the display coordinate system so that it rotated with the nearest body. I.e., if you were orbiting Mercury, the ship and Mercury would always lie on a horizontal line. It was also amusing to crank up the gravity (really, change the timescale) so that landing was just barely possible.

Among the features of the program was a built-in debugger that would continuously display the contents of a selected location. This was especially helpful in getting the software floating-point arithmetic to work.

Answer 10

it relatively is stated as POV or attitude. The digital camera continuously shows us the deliver on a point airplane (or increasing or falling as mandatory). The arguement for 2 ships assembly on the comparable point airplane, is that when a deliver sees yet another, and makes a decision to ideas-set, then the two would attain an excellent point for his or her very own 'attitude'. to that end you get 2 ships pointed at one yet another (including 2 boats on an ocean) fairly than one being the opposite direction up or off point.