Why do spaceships need to travel so fast to get into outer space?

Answer 1

i think a journey into space takes so long because if you want to look and study the stuff properly it will take a while

The distances between the planets and moons of our solar system are very large; and the spacecraft we can build at this time are simply not fast enough to be able to travel those large distances without having to take a long time to do so.

Answer 2

A rocket that is leaving the earth needs to travel at high speed to leave the earths gravity.

The speed needed is approx 40,000km/h to break free from earths gravitational pull.

An easy way to imagine this is if you pick up a tennis ball and throw it as fast as you can (eg, 90km/h) the tennis ball will travel up into the sky then will be pulled back down to the earth.

Now you can throw the tennis ball at 20,000km/h. The ball would travel approx half way around the globe before being pulled back down to the earth.

Now imagine you can throw the ball at 40,000km/h. The ball would leave the earth then travel around the earth in orbit.

Answer 3

The problem is fuel. In space, there are no brakes, nothing to slow you down - except the thrust of your own rockets. Fuel is scarce and precious (like everything else in space) and at the end of the trip, there isn't any left. So the only way to slow down is to skim lightly through the upper layers of the atmosphere, and allow friction between the spacecraft and the upper atmosphere to slow you down.

Answer 4

They don't. "Escape velocity" is a misnomer, an error born out of trying to do the math about a rocket as if it were an artillery shell.

"Escape velocity" for the Earth is about 25,000 miles per hour, or 7 miles per second. If you were to fire a shell from a cannon, it would need to exit the cannon at the "escape velocity" to escape Earth's gravity and continue into space. But rockets aren't cannon shells, and with enough fuel can continue into space at whatever velocity you want.

Achieving orbit is a different calculation. In order to get into orbit, a rocket must accelerate to its desired orbital velocity for that altitude.

Answer 5

Because if it went slow it wouldn't be able to get into out space. c;