On June 3, a third rocket thrust will drop the craft to a 93-mile orbit, and a final rocket firing 90 minutes later will send Compton into a long, fiery fall toward the Pacific Ocean.
22.
When rocket thrust is applied in short bursts the other sources of acceleration may be negligible, and the magnitude of the velocity change of one burst may be simply approximated by the delta-" v ".
23.
The reason for the debacle, scientists concluded months later, was that the manufacturer, the Lockheed Martin Corp ., had specified the rocket thrust in pounds, while NASA assumed that the thrust had been specified in metric-system newtons.
24.
Ask a fighter jock what it feels like to push the throttles to afterburner and ignite 23 tons of rocket thrust behind his butt, and chances are he will have no idea _ he's been too busy to think about it.
25.
Rocket engines can certainly be used to increase and decrease the speed of the spacecraft . However, rocket thrust takes propellant, propellant has mass, and even a small increment ? " v " ( delta-" v " ) in velocity translates to far larger requirement for propellant needed to escape Earth's gravity well.
26.
In principle, maneuvering may be achieved by various means such as drag fins that project through the bubble into the surrounding liquid ( p . 22 ), by tilting the nose of the object, by injecting gas asymmetrically near the nose in order to distort the geometry of the cavity, by vectoring rocket thrust through gimbaling for a single nozzle, or by differential thrust for multiple nozzles.
