With the technologies that are coming up it is not too late till we fly airplane in space, let us look at the challenges.
HOW AIRPLANE FUNCTIONS?
Airplane in space are able to fly because air moving along the wings holds them up. As the plane’s engines move the wings forward, the air has to flow both over and under them. The wings are designed so that net effect is that the air pushes them upward, countering the downward pull of gravity.
HOW IS A ROCKET DIFFERENT FROM AN AIRPLANE?
Rockets do not depend on air, even for burning their fuel. Rockets take advantage of Newton’s third law, that “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
We need to shoot out a lot of high-speed material opposite the direction we want the rocket to go. Most rockets use high-speed exhaust gases from burning rocket fuel to propel themselves up and away from Earth’s surface. Unlike planes, they don’t need air to lift them up.
Watch the video to know more –
PROBLEMS WITH THE AIRPLANES
The tricky thing is the Earth’s gravity, which keeps today’s standard aircraft out of space just as surely as it keeps you and me regrettably moored to the planet’s surface. According to NASA, any vehicle hoping launch into orbit has to travel about seven miles per second (11 kps), or about 25,000 mph (40,000 kph). You’re average sub-sonic airliner, of course, doesn’t fly near that fast.
There’s fuel problem as well. The shortest distance between Earth and space is about 62 miles (100 kilometers) straight up. Which by general accord is where the planet’s boundary ends and suborbital space begins.
To reach orbit that way, NASA needs some 520,000 gallons of rocket propellant and two strap-on rocket boosters to loft a 100-ton space shuttle and its cargo into space in just under nine minutes. Flying horizontal, you can imagine, would require much more conventional fuel than an space aircraft could carry.
Large passenger plane that goes into space can’t fly much higher than about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles). The air is too thin above that altitude to hold the plane up. it’s nearly a vacuum up there. Even the lowest Earth-orbiting spacecraft orbit at around 200 kilometers (125 miles) above Earth’s surface.
To fly a passenger’s plane that go to space we need to overcome the problems that were stated in the above video. Although with the developing pace of science and technology we can look forward to turning this dream into a reality in the near future.
