a comic about space and dinosaurs.
the rocket equation is the reason we don’t live in the star trek universe. because a rocket has to carry all its fuel, it grows exponentially the further you want it to go.
rocket that goes up a few hundred metres? size of a water bottle.
rocket that goes into orbit? size of a dinosaur.
rocket that goes to the moon and back? size of skyscraper.
if we lived on a smaller planet with weaker gravity (like mars), space travel would be relatively easy. if we lived on a larger planet with stronger gravity (like saturn), space travel would be impossible. instead we live on earth, where space travel is only just possible, but incredibly difficult.
despite what some hollywood movies where rockets fly up and miraculously start floating around tell you, almost all spaceships and satellites that stay in space are in an orbit. if you’re not orbiting a planet/moon/star you’re probably either flying away from it, or about to crash into it.
another way to think of this is spaceships don’t experience “zero gravity”, but “zero g-force”. right now you are experiencing 1g of g-force, because gravity is pushing you into the ground. if you jumped into the air you would feel 0g of g-force… until you hit the ground.
a spaceship in orbit never hits the ground, so it constantly experiences 0g. essentially it is falling… forever.
essentially, most rockets use liquid fuel, while most boosters strapped on the side of the rocket use solid fuel (like on the space shuttle). boosters are a cheap way of adding more “boom” to your rocket, but they’re so inefficient you probably don’t want to carry them all the way to space.
there’s also hybrid fuel (solid fuel + liquid oxygen) which i didn’t mention because not a lot of rockets use it, and 4 panels isn’t a lot of real estate. it’s sort of a compromise between the two, and its what virgin galactic use for the spaceshiptwo.
of course “liquid fuel” can mean any one of a whole bunch of very different chemicals (hydrogen, methane, kerosene, etc) but that’s a comic for another day.
rocket science is easy. rocket engineering is hard.
yay! rocket comics are back!
so for the next bunch of comics i’m going to attempt to explain rocket science in 4-panel-comic form. which should be a piece of cake, i mean it’s hardly brain surgery, right?
(click here for a high resolution version of this illustration)
finally another slice of life illustration! these are way easier than drawing dinosaurs or spaceships.
this one probably doesn’t have as nice colours or composition as some of my other illustrations, but i sure had a blast adding all the little easter eggs around sedna’s room (i wonder if any rocket nerds will notice anything… familiar about some of sedna’s rocket designs). :P
boy i sure do seem to love trying to fit complex existential discussions into single tiny 4-panel comics.
gotta cover all the important stuff first.
you can never trust that girl when she’s wearing her lab coat.
helium-3 is theoretically useful for nuclear fusion (instead of fission), a technology which still isn’t yet viable, and even if it becomes so, it might just be cheaper and easier to build a bunch of solar panels and batteries on earth than set up a mining operation on the moon. still, it makes for a neat science fiction concept, which is something i guess.
and yes, technically i just made a sequel to the comic “helium” called “helium-3”. hire me, microsoft.
