Why do they not use air to fire rockets into space. It would give the ozone a rest.?
Answers:
To reach orbital speed, you need to accellerate a rocket to a speed of 18,000 mph. At that speed you could go from New York to Los Angeles in about 10 minutes. You would need one heck of a lot of compressed air to reach that kind of speed, particularly when you have to consider the payload (humans, satellites, scientific equipment) as well. It just isn't feasible. Rocket fuels such as Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen are enormously explosive and, therefore have the energy capacity to get a payload into orbit, but even still look at the amount of fuel that's required!
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. If you mean "pressurised air"- no, because you wouldn't have enough power for the weight of 'fuel' required. "Air to manoevure the ship" is a little vague too. Not being critical, just what exactly do you mean?
Air powered rockets? You dont mean the one you pump air into to get them to fly they simply dont have enough power to reach escape velocity. The air rocket doesnt provide a long enough burst of energy for reaching outer space. A plastic model does not compare to the payloads and weight of what goes up in to space.
I think the simple answer is volume. When you burn fuel e.g. oxygen and propellant, the thrust is created by the pressure of expanding gas. The volume of gas created is much larger than the volume of the fuel used because the fuel is stored as a solid or liquid and also because is very hot (and therefore expands) as it is burned.
To fly a rocket just by releasing compressed air would require a much larger and tougher tank to take the volume of air needed to propel the rocket to escape velocity. This is the first problem.
The second issue is that the energy needed to pump this air into the tank is naturally greater than is used to propel the rocket due to all sorts of inefficiencies in the nechanisms - heat, friction etc.
The energy to pump the air in has to come from somewhere - electricity for an electric pump, fuel for a motorised pump etc.
So in the end, there is no great saving because the fuel is being burned elsewhere in the process and is probably less efficiently used.
Perhaps a totally different propulsion system is required? Some interesting stuff at http://quantumgravitics.tripod.com/. to start with.
Ozone? Please tell me what do rockets do to the ozone layer? Isn't that CFCs etc?
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