• Question: y cnt rockets go tht far in space

    Asked by kelarocks14 to Sara, Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley on 17 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by deeksy234, babysportz, ryanmccabe.
    • Photo: Sara Imari Walker

      Sara Imari Walker answered on 9 Jun 2011:

      Hi kelarocks14! I personally wish we could make rockets that would go much farther! It would be amazing the things we could explore. However, it is challenging to build rockets that go very far. Fuel is one major issue. Rocket fuel is not that expensive BUT you need A LOT of it! And, I really mean a lot. For the space shuttle it requires 450,000 kg of solid fuel and another 500,000 gallons of liquid fuel to escape Earth’s gravity. This is because the gravitational pull of the Earth is very hard to escape! That being said, we do have a lot of small satellites exploring far out places such as Mars and Saturn. Cassini is currently at Saturn launched by the European Space Agency a few years ago. Once we escape the gravity of Earth or another body it is not so hard to go much further. For example, Voyager launched in 1977 is currently the farthest man-made object from Earth. It is so far from Earth it has been able to take a picture of our entire solar system! Currently voyager is 116x further from the Sun than us – the Sun must be looking very small from out there!

    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      I think Sara got this!! 🙂

    • Photo: Julia Griffen

      Julia Griffen answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hey Kela and deeksy,

      I guess its a simple issue of fuel, as sara explains (some good facts!), and time. Space being massive it takes quite a while to get there, they’d have to be unmanned rockets of course, imagine if it was possibel to be on voyager and being away from home for 34 years!

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