Re: ICBM's go higher than the shuttle?


Eric wrote:
Don't know what initially led me to this, but found it interesting.

ICBM's fly higher than the space shuttle?

The shuttle's orbit altitude is, what, 100 to 200 miles?

While the Minuteman has an apogee of 700 miles?


It's like comparing a major like baseball pitcher to kid in the
backyard shooting free throws with a basketball. The basketball
achieves higher altitude than the baseball, even though the baseball
pitcher has a more powerful arm throwing a smaller mass.

The mission of an ICBM is to go up and down without entering a
sustainable orbit, and without needing to fire retrorockets to leave
that orbit that it never entered.

The mission of the space shuttle is to just get out of the earth's
atmosphere and achieve a sustainable orbit that never enters the
atmosphere. Eventually, it will have to fire the OMS engines to
re-enter.

It's not surprising that the ICBM mission is best accomplished by
putting a little more arc on the trajectory, to get a reliable re-entry
at the proper angle, sort of like the basketball arcing up to go
through the hoop at the proper angle. On the other hand, the shuttle's
mission is most efficiently accomplished by putting no more energy into
altitude than absolutely necessary, using most of the available energy
to get horizontal velocity.


Note that, if nobody cared about getting to orbital velocity or
re-entering safely, the shuttle has enough energy available to achieve
a much higher altitude than it typically actually achieves, just like
the baseball pitcher is capable of throwing the ball much higher than
he normally throws it for a regular pitch.

.

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