Ask an Explainer
Q:
How do spacecrafts fly? What are they being powered by?
A:
To get to space, spacecraft use huge rocket boosters to thrust them into the sky and out of Earth's atmosphere.
In space, flying is a little different - there's no air, so no drag, which means that once a spaceship starts 'going' in one direction, it will keep going, without slowing down, until something pushes or pulls it onto another trajectory. To speed up or change direction, most vehicles use thrusters, though satellites will actually use rotation wheels, or gyroscopes, to turn.
Posted on December 18, 2014 at 8:14 pm
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