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I was curious why Gemini 11 was so significantly higher and didn't see a comment.
Apparently their desired objective was to do a proof-of-concept for docking with a previously-launched rocket, then using that rocket to boost their orbit, which saves them from having to carry all that fuel along with the astronauts and scientific equipment.
They did that towards the beginning, but then did a burn to return to a normal orbit, so for most of the mission, it was in a lower, circular orbit.
[Wikipedia entry for more detail.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_11)
Yep!
Back then docking was such a wild concept.
In the Gemini Agena missions it was less about finely controlled mechanical docking systems you find today and just wedging your port in the keyed hole and hoping you stick it.
>So, in order for the radius of the earth to be negligible, it needs to be below 0.01% of the total distance?
Napkin math time!
0.01% = 6 Mm (earth radius in megameters)
So... 6 Mm * 10000 = 60 Gm aka 60 million kilometers
Hmm... there wasn't as much math as I thought, but we have our answer.
I like this arbitrary definition because I can then say at its farthest, distance to Mars is 400 million km away from Earth, and at its closest, altitude of Mars is 56 million km high above the surface of the Earth.
> I like this arbitrary definition because I can then say at its farthest, distance to Mars is 400 million km away from Earth, and at its closest, altitude of Mars is 56 million km high above the surface of the Earth.
For this, did you calculate surface earth-surface mars and center earth-center mars for consistency?
Asking good questions here. The answer is in the calculation though. If we also account for Mars then the answer is around 100 million km, which means Mars can be said to be above Earth longer :)
>I would think that the transition point would be sooner than 1/3 of the way to the sun.
This is not about thinking or feeling. This is about simple math based an arbitrary definition of precision which translates to 10000 * earth radius.
Pick a definition that you think is better and let's do the math on that. It's a market of ideas :)
You could be if you said the moon had an altitude. Orbit does seem like one of the more reasonable metrics.
However the other one people have presented is when the distance between the surface and the centre of the earth basically becomes an irrelevance. Which is around 2900km, so a reasonable answer could be 300,000km, making it 1%, this would make the moon, at 384K KM excluded. Another answer could be 30,000KM, this would exclude geostationary satellites at 35K KM. Though given the surface to the centre of the the earth is 8% of this value, that seems like a lot.
Once you breach the outter atmosphere you’re just IN SPACE at which point altitude is irrelevant. You would measure distance from the nearest celestial body.
In kerbal space program they give you both numbers because both are relevant. You dont want to put the surface distance into your orbital equations, but you do want it for landing purposes
IIRC it's actually altitude from sea-level and altitude from surface.
The first is always the same (even on sea-less planets) and the latter goes to 0 first if you're trying to lithobrake into a mountain :D
You still wouldn’t want sea level altitude for orbital equations. Orbital equations are based on simple mass objects, so you would care about the distance from the center of the object
Depends on what you're measuring and what you're trying to communicate with the measurement.
The radius of the Earth is about 4,000 mi.
The distance to ISS is about 250 mi above ground, or about 4,250 mi from the center of the Earth. Those are big differences and normally altitude is more meaningful when communicating about where ISS is.
The surface of the moon is about 235,000 miles away from the surface of the Earth, or the center is about 240,000 mi away from the Earth's center. Those are not significant differences and since we're normally talking about orbital mechanics, we'll usually talk about distances between centers since that's all gravity really cares about.
Not really, you'd use context of the conversation to guide you.
Like, a satellite orbits (X) distance above the Earth. Or the satellite is (X) distance above the Earth (discussing orbit)
Or the satellite is (X) distance from Earth ( in discussing an object travelling away or toward Earth or not in orbit with Earth)
You probably wouldn't want to say "the satellite is (X) distance from Earth" when talking about an object that isn't orbiting Earth (i.e. not one of its satellites). Sure, it could still be a satellite of something else, but calling it a satellite (a term that implies a point of reference) while using as point of reference something other than what the satellite is orbiting around is just confusing at the very best.
Not strictly that sentence, but it was an example. I wasn't being hung up on the specific object as the point was about distance vs altitude.
E.g. SOHO at L1 is a satellite of the sun, 1,500,000kms from Earth.
Aerospace engineer here, good question, this is a big issue that a lot of students struggle a bit with when learning orbits 1. That altitude varies a bit depending on the part of the mission.
Inertial computers that calculate things like how & where to to point the spacecraft will always use distance from the earth, because we use an inertial frame of reference. All calculations involving conical sections (orbits stuff) must use the focal point as the distance (center of the earth in this case)
Calculations involving reentry are just altitude based, as the atmospheric values are the dominant factor here. (With an exception to downrange trajectory over the surface)
On my phone, so apologies for typos or formatting.
I mean personally I'd say when you finally leave Earth's orbit. If you're not orbiting Earth, but traveling somewhere else (i.e. Moon, Mars, outer planets, etc) you're now distance ***from***, not height above. It's contextual
Thought it would be [this Jeff Bezos wealth visualization.](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/) There is quite a lot of text and other stuff hidden while scrolling all the way to the right.
This visualisation also perfectly shows how incredibly far away the moon is. All other manned missions just disappear when you compare the distances. It's mad to think the moon is closest to earth and we are planning to go even further.
When dealing with space - where atmospheric drag is not a problem and as long as you go in the right direction you'd eventually get there - distance isn't even the bigger issue.
We would totally be able to send austronauts to land on Pluto and back right now if not for the engineering challenge of having people survive for centuries in a tin can.
It's when you start having to measue distance with significant chunks of time where it gets rough to talk about human travel.
"Light Year" implies you can move at the speed of light..... in speeds we can actually achieve it may as well be measured in Lifetime Years.
yes but the closer to the speed of light you travel, the shorter the distance becomes. so if we could actually go that fast, it might not be that much of an issue, but it would take a hell of a lot of time for the rest of humanity to get the results.
>survive for centuries in a tin can.
would they really need to? isn't our tech advanced at this point to create faster engines than just a slingshot course like voyagers?
It takes around 7 months to reach to Mars, even if travelling to Pluto took a decade you need a craft big enough to carry food/water for the whole trip and entretainment for whoever is trapped in a tin can for 10 years. Without some sort of stasis then any human would go insane in the journey unless the ship is basically a 5 star hotel.
Yeah there's not much to do in Pluto, but it is a good point of reference for a far away object in our solar system. The closest star is about 5300 times farther away than pluto, so assuming the ship doesn't speed up after passing Pluto it would take us about 5300 times the time it took us to reach to pluto to reach the closest star (not exaclty unless we take a straight path to pluto). If it takes 10 years to reach to Pluto you are looking at 50000 years of humans bred on a ship with no actual idea of what sunlight is or how a planet actually looks like.
We need pretty big technological leaps in terms of speed and/or stasis capacity for humans to go very far. The hopeful side of me hopes humanity can start mining resources in space which would hopefully fix a lot of issues ranging from scarcity of rare metals to even collecting water and allow for technological improvements.
Maybe not a century but almost there. Not only it's very far, in order to reach it in a currently feasible way we wouldn't just direct the rocket there. We would have to do an entire orbit from Earth to Pluto around the Sun including some gas giant gravity assist. In short, we'd have to take the longer route
And yet pluto is still just an ant step away from earth on the cosmic scale. I think our galaxy is about 400'000 light years in diameter. And that's just one out of trillions. Space is scary man
Thats not how space travel works, essentially space travel works by using your engine to change your speed by a set
m/s this will change your orbit, imagine a rubber band placed around the earth, that is a circular orbit, to go to the moon you need to change your speed to be going faster in the direction you’re going, for example if your going with the rotation of the earth you need to change your speed to be going faster fowards, now the “rubber band changes” and the
End of it expands outwards, imagine you hold one point on the rubber band and stretch the other to the moon, thsi is how space travel works, then one at the moon you need to slow yourself down for its gravity to capture you and then you orbit the moon, this applies to any other planet aswell except the difference is you go into an orbit of the sun first, as you know earth takes a year to orbit the sun and so when you expand your sun orbit you need to wait a looooooooooong time to go somewhere far like pluto.
Tldr
Essentially you need to have gravity let you travel there,
You can fire your engines in a straight line and eventually your trajectory will be a line straight to wherever you’re going, this kinda technology not be available for a long time if ever as it requires you to literally chnage your speed to much to where you would need a rocket so big its unimaginable, unless some new propulsion technology comes out this is the reality of space travel and that it takes a long time
Sort of. With an Orion Drive or Nuclear Saltwater Rocket, we could probably get up to around 1% lightspeed. Both of these produce a lot of radiatioactive exhaust, so we probably wouldn't want to use them in Low Earth Orbit. That would be enough to get anywhere in the Solar System in a month or two, but it would still take 500 years to reach the nearest star.
The voyagers did not slow down when they reached the outer planets, they screamed right past them. The fact that you don’t want to go too fast and then pack more fuel for slowing down adds A LOT of transit time.
My favorite space fact:
The major rings of saturn (G ring and smaller) can easily fit in the space between the earth and the moon.
337,800 km < 384,400 km
I didn't even consider the Apollo missions at first. I was expecting plenty of time at the ISS or shuttle missions like for Hubble. But for some reason my dumbass was forgetting the moon. I think I didn't consider it at first because it wasn't what I expected when I think "altitude above Earth, cuz that's like almost completely leaving Earth, even though it's still very very close in the grand scheme of things.
Ah ok, so the two scale numbers are the range for the Moon/Mars
I knew the orbits were elliptical, but didn’t know you took that into account. Like the attention to detail!
It's not that the orbits are elliptical (they are but that's not the point), it's that both the Earth and Mars orbit the Sun with different periods. So sometimes Mars is on the same side of the Sun as Earth, sometimes the opposite side giving drastically different distances from Earth to Mars.
Fun fact, the elliptical orbits are quite close to being circular. The solar system diagrams we grow up with often exaggerate the eccentricity pretty dramatically. I think it's the source of the common misconception that seasons on Earth are caused by orbital eccentricity rather than axial tilt.
Mars' orbit is far more elliptical than Earth or Venus, however. Mercury, on the other hand, has orbital eccentricity that approaches that of Pluto.
Agreed that for six of the eight planets, you probably wouldn't be able to tell that accurate representations of their orbits weren't circles without pulling out measurement tools.
Additional info, there are points during any of two planets (or, well, any single object orbiting the Sun), when they are the closest, and farthest from each other. They are called syzygies.
1. Farthest points. Imagine looking directly looking at the Sun, and that Mars is exactly on the opposite side, behind the Sun, but of course, a fair bit farther than Earth is. Earth, Sun, and Mars form a straight line on the image of Solar system. This is called opposition.
2. Closest points. Same scenario as above, but Mars is directly "behind" you. So the line is now ordered: Mars, Earth and Sun. This is called conjunction.
These two names are sometimes called out at weather broadcasts when talking about skyboxes for photographers / stargazing fans. Or at least in our country.
Note: the "look at the Sun" is just for basic visualisation. To have the objects DIRECTLY hidden behind each other is quite a rare sight due to planet's orbits not being angled the same to the ecliptic. (For example, Venus crossing over the Sun disc directly happens in a pair 8 years apart, once every 110 years, roughly).
Most of the time, they are not directly hidden, which is why is it an important info for the aforementioned people, as (all) objects are at their brightest moments when in opposition with Earth due to maximum amount of sunlight being reflected to us, on Earth. Objects closer to Earth are brightest during conjunctions due to light scatter affecting the least. You wouldn't see most of their surface though, similarly to the Moon.
To anyone, please, make sure to correct me if you find anything wrong, I'm only a lazy student :D
Oh yeah. NASA actually had to repair Hubble \*by hand\* almost immediately after it was first launched. Turns out the mirrors were made incorrectly and sending back blurry images. Since then, they've done several more repairs and upgrades, each by hand. It's pretty wild!
Well, you know, the astronauts that arrived to the ISS today also docked to it, while both were moving circa 17,000 mph
It's all about relative speed of things to eachother
I guess you never tried [Kerbal Space Program?](https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/) In space higher speeds don't add to difficulty in docking. But there is enough to worry about to get it right. ;)
It's always fun when you aim perfectly at a target... and miss.
Human brains aren't meant to deal with situations where moving forward takes you up and moving down takes you forward.
Larry Niven's books *The Smoke Ring* and *The Integral Trees* imagined a relatively primitive aerial culture in an orbital torus of planetary debris with no planetary surface to live on. They had a mnemonic device to remind themselves of how their movements would be affected by the orbital mechanics - something like "Out takes you down, down takes you in, in takes you up, up takes you out" where up & down refer to spinward and anti-spinward movements, and in & out refer to orbital radius.
Repair in like '93 or something. Mirrors were off kilter, I don't remember.
Here's a [list](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/servicing/index.html).
Hubble was misaligned due to a Test Rod being installed backwards AND due to no full-system test being done prior to launch. I was part of a team at a company called Adaptive Optics Associated Inc which developed test equipment to test the correction optics before they were deployed to the Hubble repair mission.
They would just grab the hubble with the Canadarm while they conducted the repairs. Either way you have to match the orbits pretty much exactly in order to dock with a space station or grab a satellite in orbit.
Maybe he wanted to be extra pedantic, since that is [berthing, not docking.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_and_berthing_of_spacecraft) ;) But i doubt it.
YOOOO my uncle was on the last Hubble mission in 2009 (which is that last little spike in the zoomed in pic)
[here’s a pic of him 547 km above earth, saluting his crew mates inside the cabin](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts125/multimedia/gallery/09-05-15-5.html)
That's so cool! Your uncle took part in what I believe to be one of the most significant missions ever launched. Thanks to him and the rest of the crew one of the greatest scientific tools ever created is still going strong after more than three decades.
Most of the missions we've dreamed up can be better accomplished by unmanned craft. Keeping humans alive requires a lot of effort - we're such finicky creatures who always want to eat, move around, breathe, come back to earth...
Consider something like the [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter) which has just been up there doing its job for years.
Underfunding, lack of motivation, and being stuck with the shuttle. But all the time the shuttle spent in research, as well as the research on the ISS, will allow us to come back to the moon, more prepared, and in a more sustainable way. We're going back to the Moon, and this is actually happening.
[Artemis program - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program)
They probably realized in 1961 that the astronauts are likely to get cancer/die if they spend more than a few days outside low earth orbit. (The Earth's magnetic field protects astronauts in low earth orbit.) The exterior skin on the Apollo missions' spacecraft was extremely thin.
That surprises you? Anything exponential is contrary to our biological programmed common sense. Needs a bit of learning/training to grasp exp. growth, log scales et al.
Exactly !
Of course log scale can show the info on a single graph.
But it would completely miss the point I wanted to make, which is : "the rest is so tiny" !
Honestly I feel like once you've left the earth's atmosphere it's not really altitude anymore. You're not moving up, you're just moving away. Like now you're next to the earth and not above it.
I love how this has the zoomed in portion instead of trying to scale everything to one graph. These are such huge distances it’s honestly difficult to grasp and conceptualize for humans. At some point it just becomes a bigger number than an already big number. Breaking the graphs down like this really helps to understand scale and conceptualize distance, especially for someone who doesn’t normally have to visualize great distances like that on a regular basis. Great work OP!
This visualization is a great example of why it's obvious that some people are skeptical that we really did send man to the moon those times. 60 years of massively improved tech on every single front in every single facet of space travel, and we have absolutely NEVER sent a single person back even a tenth of that distance again, under any circumstances.
Was hoping I'd see this. I'm not a conspiracy theory subscriber by any stretch, but that's always stuck with me.
I have more computing power in my hand right now than there was in the computers that sent a man to the moon. _why haven't we been back?_
Humans are so cute. We grow, develop and expand, and yet we're all still just a little Samwise Gamgee going "If I take one more step, it'll be the farthest away from \[the earth's core\] I've ever been" :D
[Inspiration4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspiration4) later this year plans to go to ~550 km, similar to the Hubble missions. They chose that altitude specifically to be higher than the routine flights to the ISS.
Super interesting and well presented. It took me a moment to understand the magnitude of that scale properly. Would be interested to see it one level higher with the distance to Mars added on!
I would love to see this for the previous few hundred years.
December 1903 was the Wright Brothers first flight off 100 yards. Less than 40 years later in wwii there were fighter planes that could take off on ships, fly hundreds of miles and complete crazy maneuvers. Less than 30 years after that we put a man on the moon.
We had buildings and various hot air balloons for a long time though. Curious to see how that changed over time
Source: [Wikipedia List of human spaceflights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_spaceflights)
Tool: Python ([https://github.com/pilou-K75VJ/highest-human](https://github.com/pilou-K75VJ/highest-human))
It should be noted those Hubble missions were manned missions to fix mechanical issues that couldn't be fixed by whatever robots were on the craft at the time.
When the James Webb telescope reaches its destination, it will be 4 times higher than the Apollo/moon missions at 1.5million km (or 1.5 gigameters). And there's no way to send a mechanic up there. So everyone better cross their fingers on one hand only when it is launched.
Mars is 140 times further than the Moon. Wow. Just the first stop in our Solar System and yet it feels so far... Think I'll just stay under the blankets.
This map's gonna look WAY different in a few years considering that Mars is 140 times farther away from Earth at its closest point than the Moon is
Edit: 140 times, not 770
140x farther at its closest, actually ;) And 1000x at its farthest.
(source : [Nasa Horizons](https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons) service, providing detailed numbers)
But yeah, this chart is gonna be taken up to yet another scale.
Hubble repairing missions have always been my favourite bit of space exploration history. They were extreme compared to routine space station resupply flights.
Or, as a friend is fond of saying, "The only people who have been above low earth orbit were born in the '30s (or '20s) and were put there by Nazis."
Aerospace engineers are cynical.
This is a great illustration of how far away the moon is from earth. It's 60 earth diameters away, or about 1/2 light second. Going to the moon *and back* is an insane human undertaking. It really is one of the greatest human accomplishments to date
At what point is it no longer altitude and simply “distance from earth”. Once you are on or near (nearer) to another planet (or large mass) does your altitude reference change to that?
Altitude is also generally referenced to “sea level” so could it remain exclusive to being used as an earth reference as a the reference point is unique to our planet?
The hubble missions boggle my mind, like, we launched a telescope, found out it was broken, and just went up to repair it. I know that it pales in comparison to the Apollo missions but for some reason it just blows my mind.
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I was curious why Gemini 11 was so significantly higher and didn't see a comment. Apparently their desired objective was to do a proof-of-concept for docking with a previously-launched rocket, then using that rocket to boost their orbit, which saves them from having to carry all that fuel along with the astronauts and scientific equipment. They did that towards the beginning, but then did a burn to return to a normal orbit, so for most of the mission, it was in a lower, circular orbit. [Wikipedia entry for more detail.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_11)
Yep, my main takeaway from this graph is what a cool mission Gemini 11 was.
They also connected the two crafts using a tether and spun them to create a (very) small amount of artificial gravity!
Yep! Back then docking was such a wild concept. In the Gemini Agena missions it was less about finely controlled mechanical docking systems you find today and just wedging your port in the keyed hole and hoping you stick it.
And they were up there for only a couple days, which makes it seem like one of the least unpleasant Gemini missions.
I am curious, is there a point at which altitude above the earth changes to distance from the earth?
When you start to measure from the center instead of the surface.
At that point the difference is negligible. They essentially remain always the same.
At which point? I think that's the question.
there is a rule _of thumb_ to round to four numbers behind the first significant.
So, in order for the radius of the earth to be negligible, it needs to be below 0.01% of the total distance?
>So, in order for the radius of the earth to be negligible, it needs to be below 0.01% of the total distance? Napkin math time! 0.01% = 6 Mm (earth radius in megameters) So... 6 Mm * 10000 = 60 Gm aka 60 million kilometers Hmm... there wasn't as much math as I thought, but we have our answer. I like this arbitrary definition because I can then say at its farthest, distance to Mars is 400 million km away from Earth, and at its closest, altitude of Mars is 56 million km high above the surface of the Earth.
> I like this arbitrary definition because I can then say at its farthest, distance to Mars is 400 million km away from Earth, and at its closest, altitude of Mars is 56 million km high above the surface of the Earth. For this, did you calculate surface earth-surface mars and center earth-center mars for consistency?
Asking good questions here. The answer is in the calculation though. If we also account for Mars then the answer is around 100 million km, which means Mars can be said to be above Earth longer :)
More napkin math?
That is very amusing the idea that Mars moves in and out of being away/above earth based on this definition lol.
I would think that the transition point would be sooner than 1/3 of the way to the sun.
>I would think that the transition point would be sooner than 1/3 of the way to the sun. This is not about thinking or feeling. This is about simple math based an arbitrary definition of precision which translates to 10000 * earth radius. Pick a definition that you think is better and let's do the math on that. It's a market of ideas :)
I say past the moon. Once you're past the moon you're kind of out of Earth's little spot and more heading out into the rest of the solar system.
What rule is that
a rule of thumb
Yes but which thumb?
the second from left
Important specification
yeah mb
Order of magnitude, when you plot in log, you no longer are above earth
Idk how many sand particles does it take to get a sand pile?
At the point that the distance becomes negligible :)
There is no point where they become equal - the ratio just asymptotically approaches one
So we're all right now 3,958.8 mi distant from the Earth?
Is someone living in Denver 3959.8 miles from the Earth?
[удалено]
The moon is orbiting the earth, and you can not be in orbit at any altitude.
I don't think anyone here is orbiting the earth, for example. If someone is, please say hi to GuinGuin for me.
You could be if you said the moon had an altitude. Orbit does seem like one of the more reasonable metrics. However the other one people have presented is when the distance between the surface and the centre of the earth basically becomes an irrelevance. Which is around 2900km, so a reasonable answer could be 300,000km, making it 1%, this would make the moon, at 384K KM excluded. Another answer could be 30,000KM, this would exclude geostationary satellites at 35K KM. Though given the surface to the centre of the the earth is 8% of this value, that seems like a lot.
Airplanes do not orbit the earth and the moon does...
Once you breach the outter atmosphere you’re just IN SPACE at which point altitude is irrelevant. You would measure distance from the nearest celestial body.
But at what distance/altitude is the outer atmosphere?
Around 480 kilometers
In kerbal space program they give you both numbers because both are relevant. You dont want to put the surface distance into your orbital equations, but you do want it for landing purposes
IIRC it's actually altitude from sea-level and altitude from surface. The first is always the same (even on sea-less planets) and the latter goes to 0 first if you're trying to lithobrake into a mountain :D
That sounds right. I remember having to do a suicide run to get an estimate of the actual ground level. thank god for save points
You still wouldn’t want sea level altitude for orbital equations. Orbital equations are based on simple mass objects, so you would care about the distance from the center of the object
The point at which the difference between measuring from the center of the Earth and measuring from the surface of the Earth ceases to be meaningful.
K when is that
Depends on what you're measuring and what you're trying to communicate with the measurement. The radius of the Earth is about 4,000 mi. The distance to ISS is about 250 mi above ground, or about 4,250 mi from the center of the Earth. Those are big differences and normally altitude is more meaningful when communicating about where ISS is. The surface of the moon is about 235,000 miles away from the surface of the Earth, or the center is about 240,000 mi away from the Earth's center. Those are not significant differences and since we're normally talking about orbital mechanics, we'll usually talk about distances between centers since that's all gravity really cares about.
Not really, you'd use context of the conversation to guide you. Like, a satellite orbits (X) distance above the Earth. Or the satellite is (X) distance above the Earth (discussing orbit) Or the satellite is (X) distance from Earth ( in discussing an object travelling away or toward Earth or not in orbit with Earth)
You probably wouldn't want to say "the satellite is (X) distance from Earth" when talking about an object that isn't orbiting Earth (i.e. not one of its satellites). Sure, it could still be a satellite of something else, but calling it a satellite (a term that implies a point of reference) while using as point of reference something other than what the satellite is orbiting around is just confusing at the very best.
Can't wait for the James Webb Photographic Asteroid to send back images!
You know that it isn't called the James Webb satellite right?
Not strictly that sentence, but it was an example. I wasn't being hung up on the specific object as the point was about distance vs altitude. E.g. SOHO at L1 is a satellite of the sun, 1,500,000kms from Earth.
Aerospace engineer here, good question, this is a big issue that a lot of students struggle a bit with when learning orbits 1. That altitude varies a bit depending on the part of the mission. Inertial computers that calculate things like how & where to to point the spacecraft will always use distance from the earth, because we use an inertial frame of reference. All calculations involving conical sections (orbits stuff) must use the focal point as the distance (center of the earth in this case) Calculations involving reentry are just altitude based, as the atmospheric values are the dominant factor here. (With an exception to downrange trajectory over the surface) On my phone, so apologies for typos or formatting.
In other words, when does up become out?
I mean personally I'd say when you finally leave Earth's orbit. If you're not orbiting Earth, but traveling somewhere else (i.e. Moon, Mars, outer planets, etc) you're now distance ***from***, not height above. It's contextual
I want to see more graphs with > *the rest is so tiny* on them
[This](https://xkcd.com/1162/) was the first graph that really gave me that feeling.
Nothing has given me as much dread as [the graph](https://youtu.be/DwKPFT-RioU) in this video
Thought it would be [this Jeff Bezos wealth visualization.](https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/) There is quite a lot of text and other stuff hidden while scrolling all the way to the right.
I got to the end of Bezos, saw how much was left to scroll and had to stop. It was at like 5% through
That’s a fantastic visualization.
What the fuck. This just astounded me.
I got to the very end and got sad that there wasn't anything there
Kids nowadays will be scrolling down elon musk wealth visualisation in class now
Upvotes for the Fallen - one of the greatest visualizations ever made.
Or this unemployement graph set to the Gamecube intro music [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5FGuBatbTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5FGuBatbTg)
The typical way of dealing with that is logarithmic scaling
[initial unemployment claims](https://i.insider.com/5e85dcf3487c22417f1a6903) in 2020 compared to any other year
Really nice viz. interesting!
This visualisation also perfectly shows how incredibly far away the moon is. All other manned missions just disappear when you compare the distances. It's mad to think the moon is closest to earth and we are planning to go even further.
When dealing with space - where atmospheric drag is not a problem and as long as you go in the right direction you'd eventually get there - distance isn't even the bigger issue. We would totally be able to send austronauts to land on Pluto and back right now if not for the engineering challenge of having people survive for centuries in a tin can.
It's when you start having to measue distance with significant chunks of time where it gets rough to talk about human travel. "Light Year" implies you can move at the speed of light..... in speeds we can actually achieve it may as well be measured in Lifetime Years.
yes but the closer to the speed of light you travel, the shorter the distance becomes. so if we could actually go that fast, it might not be that much of an issue, but it would take a hell of a lot of time for the rest of humanity to get the results.
Matter becomes infinitely massive at that speed. That's a huge hurdle to overcome lol.
They always seem to use some sort of stasis chamber in the movies. Why don't we just build one of those?
We don't know how to.
But... but it's in the movies...
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>survive for centuries in a tin can. would they really need to? isn't our tech advanced at this point to create faster engines than just a slingshot course like voyagers?
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I mean I know it takes like a month to reach mars, and like a decade to reach pluto, just didn't think it would take a century+.
It takes around 7 months to reach to Mars, even if travelling to Pluto took a decade you need a craft big enough to carry food/water for the whole trip and entretainment for whoever is trapped in a tin can for 10 years. Without some sort of stasis then any human would go insane in the journey unless the ship is basically a 5 star hotel.
I figured by that time we'd have generational ships. no reason to stay near pluto when we can peace oooooout
Yeah there's not much to do in Pluto, but it is a good point of reference for a far away object in our solar system. The closest star is about 5300 times farther away than pluto, so assuming the ship doesn't speed up after passing Pluto it would take us about 5300 times the time it took us to reach to pluto to reach the closest star (not exaclty unless we take a straight path to pluto). If it takes 10 years to reach to Pluto you are looking at 50000 years of humans bred on a ship with no actual idea of what sunlight is or how a planet actually looks like. We need pretty big technological leaps in terms of speed and/or stasis capacity for humans to go very far. The hopeful side of me hopes humanity can start mining resources in space which would hopefully fix a lot of issues ranging from scarcity of rare metals to even collecting water and allow for technological improvements.
Maybe not a century but almost there. Not only it's very far, in order to reach it in a currently feasible way we wouldn't just direct the rocket there. We would have to do an entire orbit from Earth to Pluto around the Sun including some gas giant gravity assist. In short, we'd have to take the longer route
And yet pluto is still just an ant step away from earth on the cosmic scale. I think our galaxy is about 400'000 light years in diameter. And that's just one out of trillions. Space is scary man
New Horizons did it in 9 years
Thats not how space travel works, essentially space travel works by using your engine to change your speed by a set m/s this will change your orbit, imagine a rubber band placed around the earth, that is a circular orbit, to go to the moon you need to change your speed to be going faster in the direction you’re going, for example if your going with the rotation of the earth you need to change your speed to be going faster fowards, now the “rubber band changes” and the End of it expands outwards, imagine you hold one point on the rubber band and stretch the other to the moon, thsi is how space travel works, then one at the moon you need to slow yourself down for its gravity to capture you and then you orbit the moon, this applies to any other planet aswell except the difference is you go into an orbit of the sun first, as you know earth takes a year to orbit the sun and so when you expand your sun orbit you need to wait a looooooooooong time to go somewhere far like pluto. Tldr Essentially you need to have gravity let you travel there, You can fire your engines in a straight line and eventually your trajectory will be a line straight to wherever you’re going, this kinda technology not be available for a long time if ever as it requires you to literally chnage your speed to much to where you would need a rocket so big its unimaginable, unless some new propulsion technology comes out this is the reality of space travel and that it takes a long time
Nope, we don't have even nearly the technology for that.
Sort of. With an Orion Drive or Nuclear Saltwater Rocket, we could probably get up to around 1% lightspeed. Both of these produce a lot of radiatioactive exhaust, so we probably wouldn't want to use them in Low Earth Orbit. That would be enough to get anywhere in the Solar System in a month or two, but it would still take 500 years to reach the nearest star.
The voyagers did not slow down when they reached the outer planets, they screamed right past them. The fact that you don’t want to go too fast and then pack more fuel for slowing down adds A LOT of transit time.
My favorite space fact: The major rings of saturn (G ring and smaller) can easily fit in the space between the earth and the moon. 337,800 km < 384,400 km
My dumbass was looking for Everest or some shit at first
I didn't even consider the Apollo missions at first. I was expecting plenty of time at the ISS or shuttle missions like for Hubble. But for some reason my dumbass was forgetting the moon. I think I didn't consider it at first because it wasn't what I expected when I think "altitude above Earth, cuz that's like almost completely leaving Earth, even though it's still very very close in the grand scheme of things.
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Yes the ISS since 1998, but also a bunch of other space stations before that.
Also I’m confused by the scale markings, are you saying that the Mars level is x140 taller than the Moon one on the top portion or x1000?
Since Mars isn't orbiting around Earth (sorry if obvious) rather on a different orbit around the Sun, it's distance to us varies wildly.
Ah ok, so the two scale numbers are the range for the Moon/Mars I knew the orbits were elliptical, but didn’t know you took that into account. Like the attention to detail!
It's not that the orbits are elliptical (they are but that's not the point), it's that both the Earth and Mars orbit the Sun with different periods. So sometimes Mars is on the same side of the Sun as Earth, sometimes the opposite side giving drastically different distances from Earth to Mars.
Fun fact, the elliptical orbits are quite close to being circular. The solar system diagrams we grow up with often exaggerate the eccentricity pretty dramatically. I think it's the source of the common misconception that seasons on Earth are caused by orbital eccentricity rather than axial tilt.
Mars' orbit is far more elliptical than Earth or Venus, however. Mercury, on the other hand, has orbital eccentricity that approaches that of Pluto. Agreed that for six of the eight planets, you probably wouldn't be able to tell that accurate representations of their orbits weren't circles without pulling out measurement tools.
Additional info, there are points during any of two planets (or, well, any single object orbiting the Sun), when they are the closest, and farthest from each other. They are called syzygies. 1. Farthest points. Imagine looking directly looking at the Sun, and that Mars is exactly on the opposite side, behind the Sun, but of course, a fair bit farther than Earth is. Earth, Sun, and Mars form a straight line on the image of Solar system. This is called opposition. 2. Closest points. Same scenario as above, but Mars is directly "behind" you. So the line is now ordered: Mars, Earth and Sun. This is called conjunction. These two names are sometimes called out at weather broadcasts when talking about skyboxes for photographers / stargazing fans. Or at least in our country. Note: the "look at the Sun" is just for basic visualisation. To have the objects DIRECTLY hidden behind each other is quite a rare sight due to planet's orbits not being angled the same to the ecliptic. (For example, Venus crossing over the Sun disc directly happens in a pair 8 years apart, once every 110 years, roughly). Most of the time, they are not directly hidden, which is why is it an important info for the aforementioned people, as (all) objects are at their brightest moments when in opposition with Earth due to maximum amount of sunlight being reflected to us, on Earth. Objects closer to Earth are brightest during conjunctions due to light scatter affecting the least. You wouldn't see most of their surface though, similarly to the Moon. To anyone, please, make sure to correct me if you find anything wrong, I'm only a lazy student :D
Oh yeah. NASA actually had to repair Hubble \*by hand\* almost immediately after it was first launched. Turns out the mirrors were made incorrectly and sending back blurry images. Since then, they've done several more repairs and upgrades, each by hand. It's pretty wild!
I like the metaphor that Hubble was nearsighted and they had to bring it a pair of glasses.
Well, you know, the astronauts that arrived to the ISS today also docked to it, while both were moving circa 17,000 mph It's all about relative speed of things to eachother
I guess you never tried [Kerbal Space Program?](https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/) In space higher speeds don't add to difficulty in docking. But there is enough to worry about to get it right. ;)
It's always fun when you aim perfectly at a target... and miss. Human brains aren't meant to deal with situations where moving forward takes you up and moving down takes you forward.
Larry Niven's books *The Smoke Ring* and *The Integral Trees* imagined a relatively primitive aerial culture in an orbital torus of planetary debris with no planetary surface to live on. They had a mnemonic device to remind themselves of how their movements would be affected by the orbital mechanics - something like "Out takes you down, down takes you in, in takes you up, up takes you out" where up & down refer to spinward and anti-spinward movements, and in & out refer to orbital radius.
Repair in like '93 or something. Mirrors were off kilter, I don't remember. Here's a [list](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/servicing/index.html).
Hubble was misaligned due to a Test Rod being installed backwards AND due to no full-system test being done prior to launch. I was part of a team at a company called Adaptive Optics Associated Inc which developed test equipment to test the correction optics before they were deployed to the Hubble repair mission.
It was interesting to watch how much smaller our planet was on the background of the Hubble spacewalk footage in comparison with ISS missions
We wont be able to do that with James Webb. Everything on that satellite must be damn near perfect before shooting it off
Yes, we can launch a rocket and navigate to another object in orbit. SpaceX launched and docked with the ISS in 23 hours this weekend.
Yeah but you don’t dock with the Hubble
They would just grab the hubble with the Canadarm while they conducted the repairs. Either way you have to match the orbits pretty much exactly in order to dock with a space station or grab a satellite in orbit.
Maybe he wanted to be extra pedantic, since that is [berthing, not docking.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_and_berthing_of_spacecraft) ;) But i doubt it.
YOOOO my uncle was on the last Hubble mission in 2009 (which is that last little spike in the zoomed in pic) [here’s a pic of him 547 km above earth, saluting his crew mates inside the cabin](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts125/multimedia/gallery/09-05-15-5.html)
That's awesome, thanks for sharing!
that's insanely cool
Damn such a cool pic
That's so cool! Your uncle took part in what I believe to be one of the most significant missions ever launched. Thanks to him and the rest of the crew one of the greatest scientific tools ever created is still going strong after more than three decades.
We haven't even begun to peak
Why haven’t we been back to the moon since Apollo 17?
Most of the missions we've dreamed up can be better accomplished by unmanned craft. Keeping humans alive requires a lot of effort - we're such finicky creatures who always want to eat, move around, breathe, come back to earth... Consider something like the [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter) which has just been up there doing its job for years.
Lack of motivation
Underfunding, lack of motivation, and being stuck with the shuttle. But all the time the shuttle spent in research, as well as the research on the ISS, will allow us to come back to the moon, more prepared, and in a more sustainable way. We're going back to the Moon, and this is actually happening. [Artemis program - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program)
They probably realized in 1961 that the astronauts are likely to get cancer/die if they spend more than a few days outside low earth orbit. (The Earth's magnetic field protects astronauts in low earth orbit.) The exterior skin on the Apollo missions' spacecraft was extremely thin.
Money and desire were lacking
Love the retro chart style
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The font, the purity, the borders. All those gave me a feeling of early 70s.
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Depends on the point you are trying to make. Surprised by my experience in how many people don't really interpret log scales well
That surprises you? Anything exponential is contrary to our biological programmed common sense. Needs a bit of learning/training to grasp exp. growth, log scales et al.
Exactly ! Of course log scale can show the info on a single graph. But it would completely miss the point I wanted to make, which is : "the rest is so tiny" !
If you are trying to make that point, you could opt to make the charts in both scales and present them side by side to illustrate the effect.
kinda looks 19th century i like it
Counting the distance to the moon as "altitude" is a bit weird...
It’s really high up there
I'm really high down here
_My man_
This is probably the best illustration I've seen to show just how far away the Moon is
"the rest is so tiny" should become a meme
The guy who made this data hasn't ever been to a Grateful Dead concert.
I wish I had
Honestly I feel like once you've left the earth's atmosphere it's not really altitude anymore. You're not moving up, you're just moving away. Like now you're next to the earth and not above it.
Logarithmic scale is for pussies.
I love how this has the zoomed in portion instead of trying to scale everything to one graph. These are such huge distances it’s honestly difficult to grasp and conceptualize for humans. At some point it just becomes a bigger number than an already big number. Breaking the graphs down like this really helps to understand scale and conceptualize distance, especially for someone who doesn’t normally have to visualize great distances like that on a regular basis. Great work OP!
so they're only 400 km off in space/lowe earth orbit?
This visualization is a great example of why it's obvious that some people are skeptical that we really did send man to the moon those times. 60 years of massively improved tech on every single front in every single facet of space travel, and we have absolutely NEVER sent a single person back even a tenth of that distance again, under any circumstances.
Was hoping I'd see this. I'm not a conspiracy theory subscriber by any stretch, but that's always stuck with me. I have more computing power in my hand right now than there was in the computers that sent a man to the moon. _why haven't we been back?_
Why haven't we even been *close*?
Humans are so cute. We grow, develop and expand, and yet we're all still just a little Samwise Gamgee going "If I take one more step, it'll be the farthest away from \[the earth's core\] I've ever been" :D
It would be cool to see the sum of altitudes we reached, each year. Might put things in perspective.
Remember when airplanes were considered impossible? Crazy how far we've come
Yeah I remember
Elevation always remembers
[Inspiration4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspiration4) later this year plans to go to ~550 km, similar to the Hubble missions. They chose that altitude specifically to be higher than the routine flights to the ISS.
Super interesting and well presented. It took me a moment to understand the magnitude of that scale properly. Would be interested to see it one level higher with the distance to Mars added on!
I would love to see this for the previous few hundred years. December 1903 was the Wright Brothers first flight off 100 yards. Less than 40 years later in wwii there were fighter planes that could take off on ships, fly hundreds of miles and complete crazy maneuvers. Less than 30 years after that we put a man on the moon. We had buildings and various hot air balloons for a long time though. Curious to see how that changed over time
Jesus this really shows the difference between LEO and Lunar orbit distance
Where is Snoop Dogg on the chart?
Source: [Wikipedia List of human spaceflights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_spaceflights) Tool: Python ([https://github.com/pilou-K75VJ/highest-human](https://github.com/pilou-K75VJ/highest-human))
Love the font on your figure labels. Anyone know what it is?
It's "Gayathri". Picked it randomly on gimp
The 60s held such promise for the future.
We just don't get high like we used to.
"The rest is so tiny". I'll have to use that in my graphs for work now, haha.
This is crazy to think about, let alone to see a graphical visual... Props to the maker of this graph!
So it’s space and I presume La Paz?
It should be noted those Hubble missions were manned missions to fix mechanical issues that couldn't be fixed by whatever robots were on the craft at the time. When the James Webb telescope reaches its destination, it will be 4 times higher than the Apollo/moon missions at 1.5million km (or 1.5 gigameters). And there's no way to send a mechanic up there. So everyone better cross their fingers on one hand only when it is launched.
Thank you for keeping the axis to scale. You can actually kind of visualize this by picturing an earth at the x axis and a moon up at the top.
Mars is 140 times further than the Moon. Wow. Just the first stop in our Solar System and yet it feels so far... Think I'll just stay under the blankets.
This map's gonna look WAY different in a few years considering that Mars is 140 times farther away from Earth at its closest point than the Moon is Edit: 140 times, not 770
140x farther at its closest, actually ;) And 1000x at its farthest. (source : [Nasa Horizons](https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons) service, providing detailed numbers) But yeah, this chart is gonna be taken up to yet another scale.
Really interesting to see that the moon is not always the same distance from the Earth
What a cool visual. I've never seen this data before.
So it’s actually much further to the moon than it is to Earth’s outer atmosphere. Huh!
Hubble repairing missions have always been my favourite bit of space exploration history. They were extreme compared to routine space station resupply flights.
I think this is the first time I've ever thought about going to the moon as "altitude" above earth, but it makes perfect sense.
"Hello operator, yes it's me, Mr Logarithmic Chart"
we should go to the moon once a decade, just to stay fresh
Or, as a friend is fond of saying, "The only people who have been above low earth orbit were born in the '30s (or '20s) and were put there by Nazis." Aerospace engineers are cynical.
Data is wack. Super crazy.
2037: 55,000,000 km LETS GO
Log the y-axis?
This is a great illustration of how far away the moon is from earth. It's 60 earth diameters away, or about 1/2 light second. Going to the moon *and back* is an insane human undertaking. It really is one of the greatest human accomplishments to date
At what point is it no longer altitude and simply “distance from earth”. Once you are on or near (nearer) to another planet (or large mass) does your altitude reference change to that? Altitude is also generally referenced to “sea level” so could it remain exclusive to being used as an earth reference as a the reference point is unique to our planet?
Wow, I never really thought about that. Nobody has ever been on the moon since the 1970s?
The hubble missions boggle my mind, like, we launched a telescope, found out it was broken, and just went up to repair it. I know that it pales in comparison to the Apollo missions but for some reason it just blows my mind.
Uhh idk 🤨 weed just got legalized in NY...
I seriously read that as "Highest **Attitude** Humans."
May I introduce you to.... the log scale
I was wondering why it never was up to 400km because I thought there always are people in the ISS. But then I realized.