Moon To Stay With Matt Warren

Getting from earth to the moon is a real challenge. If it were easy then it wouldn’t have been 45 years since the last time humans went there. Since the early days of space pioneering, rockets have been the only way to reach space. To go further, and to launch more stuff, we need to build bigger and bigger rockets. But what if that wasn’t the only way to launch things into space. In this episode I’ll look at some of the possible alternatives.   The basic physics of a rocket is that in order to move the rocket forward you need to throw something out the back of the rocket, in this case explosive exhaust.  That’s newtons laws of motion - for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Rockets use a controlled explosion to push a lot of gasses at very high speed out of the rocket nozzle in order to push a big heavy rocket up into space.