Jesse Rogerson

They're trying to build a career for themselves.

They want to learn.

They want to get out.

They want to make a difference in the world.

I had a couple of new courses that I was teaching.

One was an astrophysics course.

One was a physics course.

It was a lot of fun to see them grow through it.

Heads down in the books was a lot of fun, but I didn't get as much opportunity to talk to the regular people, the non-undergrads about space.

So it's good to be back.

Close enough.

See, here's the thing.

When you fly in space, when you launch off of the earth and you want to go into orbit around the earth or orbit at the moon or whatever, the required velocities are tens of thousands of kilometers an hour.

In order, you have to move that fast to

in order to not fall back to earth that's the basics of the like force of gravity so you have to achieve these velocities you do that with these big rockets and you get moving but then when you're most of that acceleration is done after you've gotten above most of the atmosphere so you know the it the atmosphere is thickest near the surface

So at the surface, the rocket, when it's launching, is not moving tens of thousands of kilometers an hour.

They don't have to deal with that atmospheric drag as much.

But when you achieve orbital velocities, you're above the atmosphere.

And now you're moving at a speed so fast that you can't do that in the atmosphere.

So now they're on their way back and they have to find a way to shed tens of, I think they're moving at like 40,000 kilometers an hour.