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Posts tagged space travel

the rocket equation

the rocket equation published on 1 Comment on the rocket equation

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.

double sunset

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this is my favourite random factoid about mercury. on most planets the sun moves from east to west, then venus decides to be different and has the sun move from west to east, and then mercury comes along and says “¿porque no los dos?” and makes the sun do a whole reverse parking manoeuvre and then carry on like it was nothing.

i should probably mention that this happens over the course of about 8 earth days and there’s no atmosphere for the sun to light up orange, so it would probably also be the most boring sunset in the solar system, but somehow i don’t think sedna would mind.

mariner 10

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nasa’s mariner 10 was the first probe to ever visit mercury, making 3 flybys of mercury in 1974-75. the next one was nasa’s “messenger”, which orbited mercury from 2011-15, gathering much more detailed data of the planet. the third mission, europe & japan’s “bepicolombo” is on its way to mercury right now, and will make its first flyby this year on october 2, and then enter mercury’s orbit in 2025. get hyped people!

unfortunately we’ve never soft-landed on the planet and there currently aren’t any plans to. we have crashed into it though, which is something i guess. (rip messenger)

arrival at mercury

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(click here for a high resolution version of this illustration)

i thought it would be fun to do a series of drawings depicting what a future where humanity has colonised the solar system might look like, so for today’s illustration i started with the planet mercury.

here you can see an armada of spaceships approaching a city hidden inside the craters on the north pole where the sun never reaches and even water ice can be found. of course, mercury isn’t exactly the most hospitable of places in the universe even with a permanent shelter from the sun, so it would probably be more useful as a scientific outpost rather than an actual colony (like antarctica), but given all the volatile materials blasted onto the mercurian surface by the sun i suspect geologists would have plenty of science to do.

doing wildly different styles and subject matters for each illustration has really impressed upon me why so many popular online creators have found one thing that they can absolutely nail and do it over and over again. trying new things is hard. especially when you have no idea how you’re going to get to the finish line. i just hope it pays off and i actually get better at illustration cuz i’m way too lazy to keep challenging myself like this forever.

perseverance

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hearing about all the new technology perseverance used for it’s propulsive landing just made me think about how much of a miracle it was we succeeded the first time with curiosity.

but even that might not be as crazy as curiosity’s predecessors spirit and opportunity, which were covered in giant airbags, dropped from 10 metres above the ground, and bounced around on the martian surface for a while until they finally settled in an upright position. and somehow this worked perfectly both times. hey, if it’s stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid.

percy on mars

percy on mars published on 6 Comments on percy on mars

(click here for a high resolution version of this illustration)

illustration day boys! and this is an extra special one! 10.5 hours from this post, at around 8:30pm utc (12:30pm pst, 3:30pm est, 7:30am aest), the rover “perseverance” will attempt to soft land on the surface of the planet mars. if it succeeds, this illustration will be a celebration for percy and nasa’s amazing accomplishment. if it fails, this will be more of a sad farewell. either way, i definitely need to come back and edit this description based on the outcome.

this is possibly the most i’ve ever procrastinated on an illustration. drawing complex messes of machinery is so hard and confusing, i just kept putting it off. pretty happy with the outcome though.

UPDATE: PERCY MADE IT! EVERYTHING IS OKAY IN THE WORLD!!!

supernova

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(click here for a high resolution version of this illustration)

happy 2021 mates! kicking off the year with a cute illustration which some might call a ripoff of ‘the martian’, but i prefer to think of it as a tribute. if anyone recognizes this, yes it’s the one i submitted to the clip studio illustration competition months ago (i have a large buffer).

lots of spacey stuff to be excited about this year. there’s a lunar eclipse in may, spacex starship and boeing starliner will have their first orbital flights (hopefully), and the james webb telescope (the successor to hubble) will finally launch in october (maybe), and boy are my buttcheeks gonna be clenched when that happens.

relativity

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look at me, actually drawing launch towers properly for once.

plugging some quick numbers into wolfram alpha, the energy required to propel a 100 metric tonne ship to 99% the speed of light is roughly 5.472×10^22 joules. this is equivalent to 1/9th the energy of the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, or 225,000x the energy of the tsar bomba, the largest nuclear bomb in history. and that’s not even to mention the energy required to stop, come back, and stop again.

which is to say, sedna’s being a little optimistic in her dream here.

moonwalk

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now you can add “extra-vehicular activity” (e.v.a.) to the list of technobabble acronyms you can use to sound like the very smart person you know you are.

i’ve been told that you don’t actually need to put dots after each letter if you write it in something called… “capital letters”? whatever that is.