the professor showed us that you cannot get into orbit with a single-stage rocket. He worked from first principles, which in the case of rockets is the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. On a rocket, in ...

From this value and the eccentricity e of Earth’s orbit (0.017), we can calculate the semiminor axis of Earth’s orbit by rearranging the equation to calculate eccentricity: ...

Long time reader, Fran ... Instead let me find the kinetic energy needed for an orbit. Multiplying both sides of that equation be r over 2, I get: Now for energy. If I consider the satellite ...

There’s one major reason for this, and it’s referred to as the tyranny of the rocket equation. Fundamentally, a spacecraft needs to reach a certain velocity to attain orbit. Reaching that ...