Serious answers please.If you're gonna shot the moon, i mean literally, with a gun, where would the bullet go?

Question

will it like actually reach the moon. or say, if you miss, will it fly on to space? or will gravity pull it back to the earth until the bullet lands somewhere, or hits someone, or disintegrates into oblivion? Thanks.

oh my god!
thank you very much for your answers, guys! i am seriously overwhelmed.
thank you! thank you!

seriously, thank you very much for your responses. i really appreciate them. the question hit me when a friend of mine said "... shoot the moon. even if you miss, you'll land among the stars!"

thanks everyone.

Answer 1

Your bullet would become a stray bullet and probably land some 2-3 miles from where you fired the shot, depending on the gun you used. If you had a "magic" bullet that would keep on course it would probably miss the moon, since it could take some 2 weeks to reach the moon at the average speed of a bullet. To hit the moon with your "magic" bullet you'd have to fire at it during the day, with no target in sight!

Answer 2

The bullet will have to be traveling faster than earth's "escape velocity". Basically, a projectile has to be able to cross the edge of the earth before it can hit the ground. Achieving this, the earth continues to curve away from it as it falls downward. This is what being in orbit is all about. Rockets are just large bullets. If the trajectory is studied, it reveals they travel straight up about a mile and then begin flying sideways. When they achieve orbit, they lie on their side. A bullet would have to go faster than a rocket to travel in a straight line to the moon. This would probably be impossible. A meteor does the same thing the bullet would do, only in reverse. Its enormous speed causes air friction to heat it up so much it vaporizes. The same thing would hapen to the bullet. The bullet would be traveling at its maximum velocity when fired, since it does not have rocket engines. It would create a long smoking cloud about a mile high before completely vaporizing. Therefore, the bullet would have to be large enough to survive the friction of earth's atmosphere. The meteor which caused the dinosaur's extinction was large enough to arrive at the earth's surface mostly intact. Again however, the energy released by the impact would need to be re-created to hurl a bullet this large directly into space at the moon. Juggling this amount of energy around was what killed every dinosaur on earth 65 million years ago, so perhaps getting something from the earth to the moon intact, and in a perfectly straight line is not a desirable thing to do - even if it could be done.

Answer 3

If you shoot at the Moon, the bullet will go up a few miles and then fall back down to Earth somewhere. No gun of any kind has anywhere near the muzzle velocity required to escape Earth's gravity, and even if it did, friction from the air would slow the bullet down so soon that it would not even leave the Earth's atmosphere.

Answer 4

I think the highest a projectile has ever reached was 111 miles, one fired from the HARP gun (High Altitude Research Project) in the 1960's. If you had sufficeint velocity & aim, you *could* shoot the moon - much as Jules Verne did in the "First men in the moon." But, you'd have to account for not only air friction, but Earths gravity pulling the projectile back, and then lunar gravity, speeding it up when it was close enough.
Strangly enough, the first couple of probes to HIT the moon - missed. It's harder than you think.

Bullets fired from a gun (any gun) will eventually fall back to Earth - but it is *theoretically* possible to leave Earth's orbit.

Answer 5

There are several possibilities:

1) You do not shoot with enough velocity to escape the earth gravity so the bullet falls back to earth (And hits something)

2) You have enough velocity but the friction causes the bullet to melt and burn up on it's way up

3) You have enough velocity and it is aerodynamic enough and/or made from a material that is heat resistant enough so it makes it as far as the lunar orbit (384000 km). You now have 2 options:

3.a) It hits the moon

3.b) It misses the moon and carries on into space. You have already attained escape velocity of the earth so there is no going back and you gained energy from gravity on going to the moon, so you will have sufficient to break orbit of that. You will be deflected slightly however. The bullet then flies off into space !

Answer 6

A bullet would need to travel 17,500 miles per hour to reach earth orbit, or 25,000 miles per hour to reach escape velocity and travel out into space. Bullets don't travel anywhere near that speed, so it would fall back to the earth.

But even if you built a gun that could fire a bullet fast enough for it to reach the moon, you'd have to do some fancy math in order to hit the moon, because the earth's gravity would make the bullet's path curve, so you could't shoot it in a straight line.

Answer 7

If you hit the Moon with a bullet, it would create a crater. But a regular gun cannot shoot a bullet that far, mainly because the bullet cannot achieve the velocity to leave the Earth's atmosphere and travel the 374,000 km to the Moon's surface. If you could hit the Moon with a bullet, and you missed, then the bullet would assume an orbit around the Earth, further out from the Moon.

Answer 8

Well, no bullet man has ever made could reach the moon. The necessity to travel 60 miles straight up just to reach the atmosphere makes it impossible. Even if you could get it that high, it would still have to have enough velocity to fight Earth's gravity to reach the moon, another 250,000 miles away.

It's a bit of a hike, the moon is.

If you fire straight up, the bullet will come tumbling down, and probably won't give anyone anything more than a nasty welt (because it will lose its rotation and ballistic trajectory if it goes STRAIGHT up).

If you fire a bullet just a few degrees off of straight up, though, it will stay ballistic and will come down at the exact same speed it was fired at, or just a little slower, and could very easily kill someone.

Answer 9

There is a thing called escape velocity. For Earth it is about 7 miles per second, which means you have to fire a rocket at 7 miles a second (about 25,000 mph) to escape Earth's gravity.

A bullet travels much slower than that. And even if you had a gun that could fire a bullet at that speed, air resistance would slow it down, and it would not have enough velocity left to escape Earth's gravity.

NB - Jules Verne wrote a book in the 19th century called "From Earth to the Moon", in which his astronauts get fired to the moon from a huge cannon.

However, daft as the notion is, Verne did know about escape velocity.

Answer 10

It would come down and land somewhere. If you shoot it directly up and there were no wind whatsoever at any elevation reached by the bullet, it would come down and hit you.

You can calculate approximately how high the bullet will go. When the bullet leaves the barrel of the gun, all of its energy is kinetic (KE = 1/2*m*v^2). At the top of its trajectory, all of the energy is potential (PE = m*g*h) assuming you shoot it straight up and it doesn't have any horizontal (sideways) velocity.

m = bullet mass (kg), g = gravitational constant on earth (9.8 m/s^2), v = initial velocity of the bullet (m/s), h = height to which the bullet flies before coming back down (m). Initial KE = PE at the top, solve for h.