[shagie]

From the archives ... How much bigger could Earth be before rockets wouldn't work? https://space.stackexchange.com/q/14383 Feb 3, 2024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39243303

And related...

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/178131/wha...

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/117347/when-a-pl...

[Cthulhu_]

Man I love this.

> Up above 10g, something really interesting happens that is kind of a theoretical limit. The mass of the rocket reaches a measurable fraction of the mass of the entire planet it's launching from.

[ck2]

one thing about physics, particularly astro-physics, is it's NEVER boring

been diving into PBS-Space-Time and DrBecky past few years as distraction from the endless nightmare of the world we are living in

this has been a great educational thread on HN too, I knew rockets would have to be bigger but didn't realize exponential and the 10g upper-limit

also puts the "Mars sample return" mission into perspective, very difficult

[shagie]

Playing with the trajectory browser at NASA is kind of neat.

https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NE...

The "view" at the bottom has an animation of the various routes. They're all EM-ME though...

If you pick some other interesting targets you can get EVJS or something like that (launch from Earth, Gravity assist at Venus, Gravity assist at Jupiter, rendezvous with Saturn)... and then the trajectory animations are much more interesting.