why cant you fly straight across the earth and reach space?

Question

why cant you fly straight across the earth and reach space

Answer 1

You can!

If you really flew "straight," while the earth's surface was curving away underneath you, then you would indeed reach space.

The catch is, whenever you move away from the earth's surface (or it moves away from you)--no matter what path you take--you are working against gravity. In order to maintain a perfectly straight path, you would have to burn a lot of fuel just to increase the separation between you and the surface.

You'd also be burning a lot of fuel fighting air resistance. If you go more or less straight up, you only need to go about 60 miles before you're outside of the atmosphere. But if you go "sideways," you'd have to travel many more miles before you finally reached an altitude of 60 miles.

So basically, it's a lot cheaper (in terms of rocket fuel) to just go more or less up rather than sideways.

Answer 2

If I understand you correctly, you actually can fly straight across the earth and into space - if you had some incredible thrust and a whole mess of other technology that doesn't really exist for getting into space. The space shuttle takes off vertically on the southern tip of Florida because that is close to the equator where the spin of the earth is slower than at the poles thus making it a little easier to achieve escape velocity (the velocity necessary to escape the Earth's atmosphere).

To take off into space, say in some kind of plane/spacecraft thing is logically and theoritically possible. I believe NASA and other space angencies are working on this and it has kind of already been done with the X prize.

But say from a standstill to take of horizontally from the earth's surface and go in an exact straight line so then the curve of the earth gradually bends away from you and yea, you would end up in space. But it would take I don't even know how much thrust and/or other technology which makes it not really practical.

Answer 3

If the object you are flying is an airplane you can't because the wings that create lift need an atmosphere! At the maximum rated altitude for that aircraft you will begin to lose altitude or worst stall the plane at the critical angle of attack!

On the other hand if you have a rocket and you fire it horizontally to the earths surface with a velocity of more than 11 km/second then you will reach space without problem!

The escape velocity for Earth is 11 km/second. The direction you fire is irrelevant (so long as the Earth is not in the way) the only problem is that you will not be in a circular orbit as others stated.

Answer 4

The first poster summed it up very well from a space shuttle perspective, though I'm not sure what you mean by "fly".

If you're referring to the use of a propeller plane or jet engine plane, then the air would become thinner and thinner as you ascend. Eventually the engine would stall (in the case of a jet) or the propeller would essentially be cutting through nothing, and no longer produce lift.

Answer 5

The SR-seventy one blackbird can no longer fly into area. The pilots area adventure is via the low air tension at extreme altitude. A jet engine demands air flowing via so as to function. while get larger, there is way less and much less air. there is not any jet in the international that ought to offer sufficient thrust at altitude to get out of the ambience on this is very own. the area return and forth isn't risky and unsafe, this is merely that orbital area flight is rather stressful.

Answer 6

the two main factors that would keep you from escaping Earth with a mundane flying device are (1) it takes a lot of fuel to travel against gravity's acceleration for 62 miles (and you have the added weight of that fuel at first), and (2) devices that push against the surrounding air would stop working as the atmosphere gets thinner.

Space PhysicsAsk Us
http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sp_ms.html

Answer 7

Other answers here are silly. Of course if you travel in a line ("straight") from the surface ("across") of a sphere ("earth") you will distance yourself from that sphere ("reach space"). If someone told you otherwise they must not understand what straight means.

Answer 8

why would you?
the earth internal pressure would crush your ship like a egg and the heat would melt the ship into soup.
not to mention the enormous energy required to drill right through the earth.
It is several miles of solid rock then liquid rock and so on
The space ship needs to be relatively light and power full to reach escape velocity and it simply would no make it safely through the earth in one piece.

Answer 9

good question....I'm no Astronomer or anything, but I would assume it has to do with gravity. Instead of flying straight across, you'll be actually going round and round due to the earths gravity pull.


NASA......give me a job.....lol

Answer 10

Well it all depends what you are flying in. In an airplane, no, you couldn't really because the atmosphere is so thin once you reach space that it couldn't fly really.