Ask an Explainer
Q:
How much fuel would it take to shoot a rocket out of the atmosphere?
A:
The amount of fuel that a rocket requires to go into space is dermined by many factors, including its weight, how much thrust its engines produce, what orbit the rocket is trying to achieve, and many others. It is very different for each rocket. The Falcon 9 rocket from Space X typically uses around 902,793 lbs of fuel. The Atlas D rocket, which launched the Mercury missions in the 1960s, used 244,056 lbs of fuel, and the Saturn V rocket, which took the first humans to the moon, required 4,578,000 lbs of fuel. A good rule of thumb is that 90% of a rocket's weight is fuel.
Posted on July 23, 2017 at 3:08 pm
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