space girl comic
yes, you can make a rocket with nothing more than table sugar and fertiliser. makes sense if you think about it. sugar has a lot of energy, and potassium nitrate has oxygen, which are the main two ingredients you need for a big boom.
if you want to try this at home, maybe consider looking up some more detailed instructions online. don’t get your pyrotechnical advice from a comic strip, kids.
rockets have pretty much always been single-use since their invention, which has been the primary reason for space travel being so ludicrously expensive. imagine how much a plane ticket would cost if an airliner could only fit 3 passengers and was destroyed after one flight. nasa dabbled with reusable spacecraft with the space shuttle, but the refurbishment of the shuttle was so expensive it would have been cheaper if they’d kept flying single-use rockets.
when spacex landed a falcon 9 first stage in december 2015, we may have finally entered an age of true reusable spacecraft, where rockets can simply be refuelled and flown again much like an airliner. of course, we’re not quite there yet, but in a few decades space travel may finally be accessible not just to astronauts and ultra-gazillionaires, but to regular folk like you and me.
…well, not really me. you’ll still probably need many thousands of bucks for a ticket, and i forfeited making that kind of money when i started drawing comics. :(
i like to imagine the ridiculous amount of time sedna must have spent practising and fine-tuning in order to nail that shot instead of just knocking on dini’s door. but then again, what was sedna gonna do with her time anyway if not launch rockets?
if only sedna had powered the rocket with whatever anti-gravity magic is in her ponytail, then she wouldn’t have had any problems.
kids, always remember your parachute. or at least make sure your neighbours have insurance.
for the curious:
specific impulse = fuel efficiency
delta-v = amount of fuel (measured in potential velocity)
t.w.r. = thrust-to-weight ratio = rockety-power vs gravity
(if it’s less than 1, you won’t be going to space today)
(click here for a high resolution version of this illustration)
hey, look! a full-colour illustration. that’s the thing that real artists do, right?
i’m gonna do one of these every ten comics or so to have a bit of fun with colour and see what fun situations sedna and dini dream themselves up in. i kinda suck at digital illustration though, so be gentle with me. i’m still figuring this out as i go.
