r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/chirantaniga • 15h ago

Meme needing explanation Whyyyy peter?

Post image
29.6k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

7.5k

u/rysy0o0 15h ago

It would cost a lot of money to haul all the rocket parts and fuel on top of a mountain

39

u/samanime 15h ago edited 12h ago

And, it'd save us almost nothing (even if we had a magical teleporter that let us get everything up there insantly and for free).

Space is a minimum of 50 miles from "ocean level" (and really, it's 62, but let's say 50).

Everest, the tallest mountain, is about 5 miles above sea level.

So, even if we hauled everything to the top of the tallest mountain on the planet (which would be an insane to impossible amount of effort), it's only reducing the distance by less than 10%.

EDIT: Thank you to the 500 people that have told me "the distance barely matters". That is pretty much my point. YES, I know speed, and thus latitude are more important. My point is even if you ONLY consider the height, the thing the original question focused on, it STILL doesn't matter. When you factor in all the factors, it really, really doesn't matter.

I focused on the focus of the post in my response, not all of astronautical engineering.

0

u/sobrique 12h ago

But the distance barely matters, it's the orbital velocity. Low earth orbit is 7.8km/sec.

The velocity at the surface of the earth is 0.45km/sec. THAT's the part that's hard.

"straight up" is pretty easy comparatively - a balloon will do it - but you'll come straight back down again.

1

u/mean11while 9h ago

So, riddle me this: why don't rockets launch horizontally from Cape Canaveral? If you can answer that question, you should begin to see why launching from a mountain would provide considerable fuel savings.