It Is, In Fact, Rocket Science

And I've covered the various spacecraft involved during the actual space race, from the vast Stock to the saw Us, from the Mercury to the Apollo, but I didn't really go into much detail about the launch vehicles or what we would more casually refer to as the rockets. So today we're gonna talk about rockets and the science behind them and some of the ones that have been used to put stuff what was once on Earth out in

space somewhere. And don't worry, I'm not going to cover every single rocket that ever was put to such use. That would sound like I was reading off a very weird phone book, because it would involve not just all these odd names that we as Americans we asn't I'm saying myself here the Americans created, but also all the different designations that have been made by various countries around

the world. Lots of countries have made launch vehicles. So I'm just gonna focus on some of the ones from the space race period because I think, uh, you know, it relates to the episodes I just did mainly, and also it has a nice narrow focus. The history of rockets stretches far back before there was ever a space race, or before there was a Soviet Union, or before there was a United States of America. And of course by

that I mean before there were those nations. Obviously the land masses were there and there were people living on them. But you know what I mean. The origins of the rocket are closely tied to that of fireworks, and I've covered fireworks in previous episodes. Scholars have nailed down the emergence of rockets in Chinese alchemy sometime during the dynasty that stretched from nine sixty Common era to twelve seventy

nine Common Era. The former curator of rockets for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, a guy named Frank Winter, attempted to narrow that down a bit, and his work suggested that during the eleventh century, Chinese alchemists were trying to suss out a formula that would lead to eternal life.

They were attempting to make practical use of the Chinese philosophy that all the universe is divided into passive and active forces, and that mixing your yin and yang materials in a proper way would create various amazing results, such as presumably never dying. So they never landed on a mixture that would preserve life indefinitely, but some of the mixtures did up having other interesting properties, like blowing up if you lit them, so they effectively invented an early

form of gun powder. By twelve thirty two, the Chinese were using rockets in warfare. They had a weapon that they called the fai Ju san Uh. And I know I'm mispronouncing that. I apologize my Chinese is terrible, but it means flying fire lances. And if you listen to the fireworks episodes that we did on text of years ago, you know there are various myths and legends about Chinese thinkers who tried to use rockets for flight and the various results of those experiments. So I'm not going to

go into those here. Instead, we're just gonna skip ahead a few centuries. In the fifteen nineties, in Germany, there was a fireworks maker named Johann schmid Lap, who attempted to create fireworks that could reach much higher altitudes through a process called staging. Staging is where you divide up a rocket into two or more stages, and each stage

contains its own propellant. So when the first stage burns out, it ignites the second stage, which in schmid Lab's case was a smaller rocket that was carried by a larger first stage rocket. So the first stage rocket ignites launches as it gets towards the end of its fuel, it ignites the fuel inside the second rocket, which then continues to launch and go even higher into the sky and deliver the payload way up in there, and you get

a really impressive firework. While schmid Lap made a practical, practical multi stage rocket, the idea had previously been theorized by an Austrian military engineer named Conrad hass hass wrote a manuscript about his ideas that predated schmid Laps designs by a few decades, including multi stage rockets. Even talked about the possibility of using liquid fuels as propellant, although that would take quite some time to come true. Now, whether schmid Lap knew of Hassa's work or not. I

don't know. Maybe he did. It's possible that this was a case of two people coming up with essentially the same idea around the same time that has happened before. Or it could be that schmid Lap had heard of Hassa his ideas and that schmid Lap was the one who was able to make practical use of them. Either way, whether he came up with the idea or not, schmid Lap was the one who actually made it work. In seven Sir Isaac Newton published his work Principia, which included

his three Laws of motion. So we see that the practical understanding of rocketry preceded a more nuanced scientific understanding of what was going on by several centuries, which is often the case where we notice something, we observe something interesting, and we even make use of that something for some time, but we don't have a full understanding of what's really going on until much later. That has happened on numerous occasions throughout human history. So what are the three laws

of motion and why are they important? Well, the first law is every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. We also call this the law of inertia. So, for example, if there is a rock sitting on a level section of ground, we would expect that rock to just sit there, to remain in that position, to stay still, unless some external force like someone's foot were to come in and be applied

to the rock. So soone kicks the rock, then we would expect it to move. But we wouldn't expect the rock to move on its own. It wouldn't just spontaneously start rolling around. That would be in violation of the first law of motion. The second law of motion is that the relationship between an objects mass, it's acceleration and the applied force is force equals mass times acceleration. Acceleration and force are vectors, meaning they don't just have a magnitude.

They also have a direction, so you have to describe them as having a direction while you're working with them. You can't just give, you know, just a unit and be accurate and this law. In this law, the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration victor, so you can't have an acceleration vector that's an opposite direction of the force vector. The equation lets us understand how velocities change when we apply

different forces to the system. And a change in velocity is acceleration, right, Velocity itself is uh is speed and direction, So acceleration is when you change something about that. You either change the speed, so you make it speed up, or you make it slow down, or you change the direction, which you know because velocity is a vector, and either one of those would be considered a change in acceleration,

or rather it would be acceleration itself. And the third law of motion is for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So you've probably heard this before, and I'm sure you have a decent understanding of it, but just in case, here's a way of thinking about. Imagine that you're standing on a platform that's suspended by ropes, right like it's a square platform. There are four ropes, one at each corner, and there's a second platform on

a column that's in front of you. But in order to get there, you're gonna have to take a pretty big step. Not not a huge step, but a decent one. As you take that step, if there were another observer watching all this, they would notice that the platform you stand on would move the opposite direction of where you were stepping. This is that equal but opposite reaction. That's

an exemplification of Newton's third law of motion. It's also ultimately what explains the phenomenon of a rocket flying into the air. When it's blasting what appears to just be fire and smoke out of its business end, the rocket is actually throwing mass in one direction in the form of very high pressured gas. The rocket itself moves in

the opposite direction because of this. If you were to sit in an office chair that has wheels on it, and then you had a mess and ball in your hands, and you threw the mess and ball straight ahead of you, that you and the chair would roll backward. Because of this principle, rockets work the same way. It's just that the rocket is throwing up mass in the form of that high pressure gas an incredible rate. So remember that second law forces equal to mass times acceleration. That's also

very important. The rocket has a lot of mass, particularly when it's full of fuel. You have the mass of the rocket structure and you have the mass of all the fuel inside of it. When a rockets engine, which is a reaction engine, It's important to note because when we hear the word engine. I don't know about you, but when I hear the word engine, I'm usually thinking about a mechanical device that forms some form of rotational power, right,

a rotational force, like a reciprocating gasolene engine. That's kind of what I think about. But a rocket engine is a reaction engine. Rocket engines fling mass in that form of hot gas uh at a very high rate of acceleration, and the combination creates a lot of force. Right. So, however much mass it is times that acceleration that equals the force. Well, the equal and obvious that reaction means, if you're pushing that much mass downward at a very

fast rate, then you're moving upward. Uh. And the speed at which you move is based upon how fast and how much stuff you're pushing down That that equation tells us all of this stuff, and we can actually figure out how much acceleration the rocket will experience if we know the mass and the acceleration of the hot gases coming out of its engine. The two sides of the

equation have to balance out. It has to be equal and opposite, right, So rocket science is hard But let's go back to that office chair and medicine ball example, because that makes it way easier to understand. So practical example, let's say I'm sitting in an office chair and I have a mass of about sixty eight ms. The chair has a mass of about twenty two kilograms, so collectively the chair and I are nine DRAMs. The medicine ball I have has a mass of four point five rams.

So at the very beginning of this I have a total mass of ninety four point five ms because I'm holding the medicine ball right, and then I also have a velocity of zero. I'm not moving, so I'm staying still. I've got this messin ball in my hands, and then I throw the mess and ball straight out in front of me at fifteen per second. That's about thirty three and a half miles per hour, and that's probably way faster than I could actually throw a messin ball. But

forget that for now. How fast am I going to travel back in my chair? How fast will the chair roll backward in opposite direction from my throw? Well, to understand that, we take the velocity of the messin ball times it's mass, So we take that fifteen per second times four point five ms, which gives us sixty seven point five Newton's technically that represents the force of the

medicine ball flying away from me. There must be an equal and opposite reaction, So that means the product of my mass and vela city has to equal negative sixty seven point five. It's equal and opposite of the original. Now it's negative because we're looking at velocity in the opposite direction of the medicine ball's flight, so it's it's from the perspective of medicine ball's flight being positive. Mine has to be negative. So it doesn't mean that I

have some sort of weird negative unit of measurement. Instead is referring to it being a different direction and opposite direction. So again forces mass times acceleration, and we know what my mass is with the chair right, it's nine. And we know that the force is equal and opposite of the force that was in the medicine ball side of the equation, so we know it's the forces minus sixty seven point five. So that means we have to divide

both sides by my mass. We divide minus sixty seven point five by my mass of ninety kilograms and we end up getting minus point seven five meters per second, So that means I'm traveling backward in my chair at point seven five per second initially before friction slows me down. Rocket science is exactly like that, only of course, way more difficult. We'll get into why it gets way more difficult in just a second, but first, y'all, I need to take a quick break. I'm gonna thank my sponsor.

The science of rocketry continued in large part because rockets could be effective weapons of war. In four engineers discovered that by designing jet vents on an angle so they're not coming just straight out, a rocket would spin when it was ignited, and that spinning motion would actually create a stabilization in the rockets flight path, kind of like a bullet experience when it emerges from a gun, It

spins and that produces stability. Uh. The st to ability of spinning objects would become a very important component, not just in space travel, but in technology in general. It's you know, I've talked about that with gyroscopes in Constantine. Soolkov Sky, who I talked about in the first episode of this whole series, proposed the possibility of space travel

through rocketry. Moreover, he theorized that a liquid propellant would be a more suitable fuel source to provide the energy necessary to push a rocket into space, but had not quite worked out how that would actually happen. Solkovski worked on some really important details about the relationship between a rocket's mass and its speed and what it would take to get a rocket into space. So let's take a few moments to understand the calculations that are necessary. Now

we've already covered the equal and opposite reaction. We understand that that whatever we want the rocket to do is going to be based upon the amount of mass it's throwing out through its engine and how fast it's throwing that mass out. But now we have to consider some other complicating fact. There's first, a rockets mass when it's fully fueled is different than the rockets mass one second before all the fuel burns up. That mass is decreasing.

Now the mass is not being destroyed, it's just being thrown out of the engine. Because you cannot create or destroy matter. You can't convert it from one form to another, but you can't destroy it, So that mass isn't being destroyed. If you talk about a rocket that has, you know, twenty thousand tons of fuel aboard it. That twenty thousand tons of fuel gets turned into twenty thousand tons of high pressured gas during the process of being shot out

of the engine. So burning fuel means you're ejecting mass through the rocket engine. So the rockets mass decreases throughout the engine burn and that affects the equations. And if you want that rocket to actually carry something into space, the payloads mass has to be taken into account along with the rocket in the fuel. Sometimes that can seem

like it's negligible, but it's still really important. So getting a payload into space as a matter of the earning, how much force you will need to escape Earth's gravity, how large your rocket will need to be to do that, how much fuel you're gonna need to move that rocket, which in turn might mean that you have to make changes to how big the rocket is. And as this continues, you can easily see it get away from you. Right, you could say, well, to move something of this mass,

i'm gonna need x amount of fuel. But if you have X amount of fuel, that's too much fuel for this rocket. So the rockets gonna have to be bigger, but the rockets bigger than the mass is greater, which means I'm actually gonna need more fuel than what I thought before, and that can quickly run away from you. So that's another complication. Any changed the design of the rocket or the payload is going to affect the amount

of fuel you're gonna need to use. And of course, when you add more fuel, you add more mass, so it's really slippery slope. When you burn the fuel, you create this high pressure gas, and releasing that gas in a specific direction provides the thrust to push a rocket. The weight of fuel you burn is equal to the weight of the gas that is generated, So if you burn a ton of fuel, you have created a ton

of high pressure gas. The burning process is what actually accelerates the mass with the release through the nozzle that provides thrust, and the nozzle also can increase the the acceleration or it accelerates. Rather, I shouldn't say increases the acceleration,

it accelerates the mass further. And by this incredible acceleration multiplied by the mass of the high pressure gas that you're shooting out of this rocket engine, that's what creates the force that allows a rocket to lift off the ground, and we measured thrust in either Newton's as I mentioned earlier, or in the good old us of A. Because we obviously refuse to do things the way the rest of the world does it, we refer to it as pounds

of thrust. One pound of thrust is equal to four point four or five Newton's of thrust, and one pound of thrust is what would take to keep a one pound object stationary against the force of gravity on Earth. One Newton is the amount of force necessary to make one mass of one kilogram accelerate at a rate of one m per second squared. This means on Earth, a mass of one kilogram pushes against whatever it is resting on with a force of nine point eight Newton's on average.

So if you have a kilogram weight on a table, that kilogram is effectively pushing against the table with nine point eight newtons of force, the tables pushing back with nine point eight newtons, a force equal and opposite. And the reason why it's nine point eight Newton's it's because Earth's gravity, at least at mean sea level, is nine point eight meters per second squared. To get space to get up to space. You have to travel fast enough to break free of the gravitational force of the Earth.

We actually figured out exactly what speed we need to do that, so that speed would be eleven kilometers per second or seven miles per second. You gotta get at at that speed in order to breakthrough an escape Earth's gravity. On March sixteenth, ninety, Robert Goddard, whom I also mentioned in that earlier episode, created a rocket that used liquid oxygen and gasoline as propellant. Liquid oxygen was used as the oxidizer. He also got to work developing multi stage

rockets and liquid fuel rockets. This was a big deal. It was the first liquid fuel rockets. They're very important, but up until Goddard, no one had figured out how to do them. They had been using solid fuel rockets, like the gunpowder rockets that the Chinese had created way back in the Sum dynasty. Uh. Solid fuel rockets burned quickly, and if they're designed properly, they do not explode. It's

easier said than done. It requires finding the right mixture of components so as you can have a rapid but controlled burn, and uncontrolled burn turns into an explosion. So typically solid fuel rockets have a whole kind of down the center think of think of a solid fuel rocket. Think of it as taking the case of the rocket off and you have a a solid cylinder of fuel.

Down the center of that cylinder is a tube or a hole, and you ignite the fuel in the center of this tube and it burns from the center out towards the edge where it's making contact with the casing of the rocket, and then the fuel is spent. The thing about it is, once you ignite a solid fuel rocket, it burns until all the fuel's gone. There's no stopping the engine once you start. Liquid rockets, however, offer up

more control. You can actually turn on or turn off the burn process, so you can control the rocket engine that way. But they also come with other challenges. So to burn stuff, you need three things. We all remember the triangle, right, You need heat, you need fuel, and you need an oxidizer. And here on Earth we tend to just rely on oxygen. Right, that's our oxidizer. We also don't have to do anything special with it if

we're on the surface of the planet. But in liquid rocket design, you need to have an oxidizer incorporated into the design of the propulsion system in order to create an environment in which fuel can actually burn. You cannot burn fuel without an oxidizer. Liquid oxygen is a frequent oxidizer, or at least in the early rockets, that was frequently used,

and that's what Goddard did. The oxidizer and fuel end up being pumped into a combustion chamber and it's mixed there, so you get a fine mix of oxidizer and fuel which can then be ignited that ends up burning off and creating this high pressure gas that then can be directed through a nozzle to create the thrust. The combustion chamber and the nozzle can get really really hot, like hot enough to break down if the heat goes unchecked.

So typically a liquid fueled rocket design will include either the oxidizer or the fuel as a super cold cryogenic liquid like liquid oxygen obviously has to be a cryogenic liquid, or liquid hydrogen has to be a cryogenic liquid. You have to get them at very very cold temperatures in

order to keep that stuff in liquid form. Typically those cryogenic liquids would pass through lines that are adjacent to the combustion chamber and nozzle and transfer heat away from those parts of the rocket engine and the pumps that provide the oxidizer in the fuel to the combustion chamber have to be incredibly strong because inside that combustion chamber

you're generating that high pressured gas. If the pumps are not strong enough to overcome that high pressure, then the gas is gonna go up those pump lines instead of out the nozzle, or they'll go up the pump lines and out the nozzle, and you don't want that. So you have to have very very strong pumps in a liquid fuel rocket, which is why, uh, it's a complicated process. Is a complicated technology, and it's why it took a good long time for someone to develop one that could

I actually work. Even Goddard's demonstration was pretty modest, and if you saw the launch today and you just watched as it happened, you'd think, well, what's the big deal. It didn't even go that high and when a few meters up in the air and then came right back down. But when you understand the technology behind it, how complicated it was, it was very impressive. Most importantly, you can control the burn of a liquid fueled rocket because you can stop the flow of oxidizer and fuel into the

combustion engine. You can turn the pumps off and once there's nothing to burn the engines off, it's not gonna create any more thrust, and then you could start it back up again when you needed to, so you it wasn't an all or nothing the way a solid fuel rocket would be. Solid fuel was much more simple, but it was more limited. So liquid fuel is the way a lot. Pretty much all the propulsion systems of all

the spacecraft had to be liquid fueled. They there were several spacecraft that would also depend on solid fuel for some stage or another. May it was like a retro rocket or a breaking rocket or something like that, or sometimes solid fuel booster rockets to get up into space. But when it came to fine tuning, we're talking about liquid fueled rockets. Well, I've got a lot more to say about rockets, but before I jump into that, let's

take another quick break to thank our sponsor. In the nineteen forties, German engineer Werner von Braun, who would later be brought over to the United States under Operation paper Clip, worked on developing the V two rocket for Germany, and those rockets used a mixture of oxygen and alcohol for propellant. They consumed fuel at a rate of one ton of fuel every seven seconds, So that tells you how much mass is being thrown out by this rocket engine. It's

a lot a ton of fuel every seven seconds. And this was the first rocket design that could actually cross the Carmen line into who space. The Americans would end up taking not just the German scientists and engineers, but also some of the V two rockets during Operation paper Clip, and then adapt those rockets for scientific experiments such as making measurements of the atmosphere at very high altitudes. The nineteen fifties saw the development of i C b ms,

also known as intercontinental ballistic missiles scary scary technology. This is where we get into the nuclear arms race, and that whole assured uh mutually assured mass destruction where you're your whole philosophy is we need to build up our weapons enough so that no one will dare pick on us, and our enemies have their weapons built up in the same way, so that way will always be at peace, because if we were to launch an attack, everybody would die. And so the only way to win is not to

play anyway without I c b ms. We also would not have had the launch vehicles that we use during the Space race. So some scientific good came out of this, uh and a lot of scary military stuff came out of it too, But this is where we started getting into putting stuff into space with satellites like spot Nick or spacecraft like the Mercury Capsule. So now I can

talk a little bit more about specific rockets. Not generally speaking, a space rocket tends to have four major components, each of which might have thousands of individual parts to them. You've got the actual casing or structure of the rocket. That's the physical form of the rocket. It's the bit that holds all the other bits in place. And then you've got the propulsion system that would be the fuel, the rocket engine, all the components necessary for providing thrust.

There's a guidance system because you want the rocket to go where you want it to go, so you have to have some way of guiding it, of steering it, and there are multiple ways that that has happened throughout the years. So you gotta have a guidance system. And then you have the payload that's whatever the rocket is carrying, like in these cases we're talking about satellites or spacecraft. Obviously, in military applications you might be talking about the satellite,

but you're probably talking about some sort of warhead. And most rockets contain at least two stages, with each stage having its own guidance system and propulsion system. The final stage is usually what ends up carrying the payload. The earliest designs for I C b m s which were intended as weapons of mass destruction that would carry a nuclear weapon. Uh, we're sort of the brainchild again of Werner von Brawn. He was working on a design in Germany during World War Two. It was designated the A

nine Slash ten. The US and the Soviet Union both rushed to develop I C b ms in the wake of World War Two. That was at the beginning of the Cold War between the two countries. The Soviets got there first. They built the first I C b M. It was a two stage missile and it was called the R seven. It was one twelve feet or thirty four meters long and measured nine point nine ft or three point two meters in diameter. It used liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. In those early early ones and kerosene

was the fuel in the early ones. It weighed two eight metric tons. The first stage of the rocket consisted of four strap on rocket boosters around a central rocket engine. Uh The central engine would continue providing thrust through both

stages of the rocket. The R seven demonstrated that the Soviet Union could launch a missile at targets on the other side of the world, and the Soviets used modified versions of the R seven for splot Nick, for the VOS stock spacecraft, for vos CAD, and for the early Soya's launches. About half of the launches used using the

early R seven launch vehicles suffered failures. It was notoriously unreliable early early on in its design, and that prompted the Soviet engineers to revisit that design and make changes to improve reliability. But the R seven would continue to the point where today the Soviets are using launch vehicles that are based off that same design. Even the Soyuz rockets that we use are relying upon those types of launch vehicles. They're still part of that our seven family.

So some of the variants also include the option of a third stage of the rocket. That was one of the things that was planned when the Soviets were thinking about going to the Moon. Over in the United States, the Atlas rocket would become the first American I CBM.

The first successful demonstration of an Atlas rocket took place a little more than a year after the Russians had launched sput Nik into orbit, and the Atlas, like the R seven, had a notorious reputation for malfunctions and launch failures.

Though General Dynamics and corvet Are, the companies that were building the missile, worked very hard to solve those design problem loans, but it was a particularly complicated rocket design, liquid fueled rocket, and it was really complex, and that created multiple points for potential failure, so all that stuff had to be worked out. The Atlas LV three B or Atlas D became the launch vehicle for the last

four manned Mercury Project missions. The failure rate created real concern, but the Atlas was literally the only vehicle that the United States had access to that would be capable of putting a payload into orbit. Atlas had what was referred to as a stage and a half design, with a first stage that was bolstered by booster. A booster rocket now the first three manned Mercury missions. What did they use? I mean if the last four used the Atlas d um what did the actually I guess the first two

Mercury missions, there were only six manned Mercury missions. What did they rely on? Well, they relied on a rocket called the red Stone that was the first American space booster. But the Redstone did not have enough fuel capacity or thrust capability to put a payload into orbit. It could only do suborbital flights. So while the Redstone was the first space booster for a manned mission, UH, it was

not capable of putting anyone into orbit. For the Gemini missions, NASA would end up using the Titan two g LV that was their launch vehicle of choice. The Titan, too was a second generation I C B M and it was a two stage liquid fuel rocket that used nitrogen tetroxide as an oxidizer I mentioned that earlier and aerosigne fifty as a fuel. And it was a simpler design than the Atlas, which made it a little more reliable.

There were fewer things that could go wrong. The Apollo program would rely on two variants of a launch vehicle called the Saturn. The Saturn one or I B if you prefer, that's the one B for all Apollo missions up to and including Apollo seven. Then starting with Apollo eight, they switched to the Saturn five, so a follow eight

to Apolo seventeen used the Saturn five launch vehicle. The Saturn one was the first heavy lift spacecraft launch vehicle in the United States, and while NASA was originally going to use it for the early Apollo missions, the organization ultimately decided that the cuts they would need to make in payload weight in order to make this work weren't worth the efforts, so instead they decided that they would

use the upgraded Saturn one B instead. Uh It was a two stage rocket, with the second stage called the S four B, which I talked to about in previous episodes. A modified version of the S four B would become the third stage for the Saturn five. The Saturn five was capable of sending a fueled CSM Command Service Module and LM or lunar module to the Moon. The S four B would provide the thrust needed to go from

an Earth orbit into a translunar injection. So the Centurn five was the only vehicle that the US had that would have that capability of actually getting someone to the moon. The Soviet counterpart to the Saturn five was not an R seven variant. It was a launch vehicle called the N one. It was a super heavy lift launch vehicle

and had three stages. The Soviets wanted the INN one to deliver cosmonauts to the Moon during the Space Race, so this was gonna be the launch vehicle that would put cosmonauts to the Moon, hopefully beating the Americans in the process. The development of the N one started several years after the Saturn five development process had already begun, so the Americans were already ahead on rocket design, so

the Soviets are behind. As a result, there was a ton of political pressure to rush through the design and production of the launch vehicle, and there was a lack of funding to do it too, so it was the worst of all worlds. Uh. This ended up including a design for the most powerful first stage rocket ever constructed.

The designer of the N one was Sergei Koraev, but he died during a surgical procedure in nineteen sixty six, which was kind of in the middle of the process of developing the INN one that caused further problems in that whole development process. Obviously, there were only four test launches held for the N one, and every single one

of those test launches resulted in failure. The second one resulted in a launch pad explosion so spectacular it entered the history books as the ninth largest non nuclear man made explosion. It was equal to the detonation of a kilo ton of T and T. So the project was scrapped. No one outside the Soviet Union would even learn about this until the Soviet Union itself collapsed. It was finally revealed in the late nineteen eighties after the Soviet Union

had collapsed. So for for more than a decade, more than two decades, the United States had no idea that this was going on over at the Soviet Union, or at least very little confirmed idea of it. The Space Shuttle program, which I'm going to talk about in our next episode, had its own launch vehicle. One of the interesting things about that vehicle is that the Space Shuttle

would be attached to an external tank. And also attached to this external tank, we're a pair of solid fuel rocket boosters, and those boosters could be recovered and reused. The external tank could not be reused, so it was not designed to be recovered. The tank was essentially just a fuel tank. So the shuttle itself had three main engines, and the external tank would provide fuel to those three

main engines. Those engines would ignite it left off, and the two solid fuel rocket boosters would ignite at liftoff. Once the solid fuel rocket boosters had burned through, they would jettison from the external tank, fall back to Earth and get recovered for reuse. And then the Space Shuttle would eventually jettison the external tank as it was heading up toward orbit. The external tank would not be reused.

But I'll talk more about the Space Shuttle in our next episode, and I'll also use that time to talk a little bit about the private launch vehicles that were created by SpaceX. I was going to do it in this episode, but these shows are running kind of along because I get gabby about all right, let's be honest, I get gabby about everything, but I I get particularly gabby about space stuff. And I know that's the case. So we're gonna save that SpaceX discussion for the end

of the next episode. That's when we'll talk about the Space Shuttle program. That will be the conclusion of the space block of content, and then we'll switch gears or we'll change navigation to go to some new destination. If you guys have suggestions for what I should talk about an upcoming episodes of tech Stuff, send me an email. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle at both of those is tech Stuff

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