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A rocket ship is accelerating at 200 m/s2, its mas is 135,000,000 kg. What is the force generated by this acceleration?

User Azad
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Acceleration does NOT "generate" force. Acceleration NEEDS force to make it happen. Without force ... provided by something else ... acceleration can't happen.

The force NEEDED to accelerate a mass with a certain acceleration is

Force needed = (mass) times (acceleration)

For the rocket ship in the question,

Force = (135,000,000 kg) times (200 m/s²)

Force = (135,000,000 x 200) kg-m/s²

Force = 27 Giga-Newtons (27,000,000,000 Newtons)


The gas-generator cycle F-1 rocket engine, developed in the US by Rocketdyne in the late 1950s, was used in the Saturn V rocket, the main launch vehicle of NASA's Apollo moon lander program . Five F-1 engines were used in the first stage of each Saturn V.

==> The thrust of each F-1 engine at full throttle is 7,770 kilo-Newtons.

It would take 3,475 of these F-1 rocket engines, running full-throttle, to provide the force calculated in the answer to this question. If you didn't have 3,475 F-1 rocket engines, then you couldn't accelerate 135,000,000 kg at 200 m/s².

(And by the way ... the mass of each F-1 engine is 8,400 kg. So 3,475 engines alone account for 22% of the mass you're trying to accelerate. And don't even get me started about the mass of the FUEL you'd need to carry.)

User NanoPish
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