How does a rocket work?

Question

please tell me in detail right from its take-off to whatever happens to the space shuttle and so on.

Answer 1

Conservation of momentum, plain and simple.

If you throw an object from the rocket, it will have a certain momentum.  The rocket has to have the same momentum going in the other direction to cancel out what you've thrown out the back.

Momentum (p) is equal to mass times velocity.

Multiply the mass of the fuel you're throwing out the back by its velocity and you have the momentum of the rocket in the other direction.  Divide the momentum by the mass of the rocket and you have your speed.

Do it again and you add more speed which is added to the speed from the first time you did it.

Keep doing it over and over very quickly, and eventually your speed gets high enough you can obtain orbit.

Stop doing it and your speed will now stay constant and your spacecraft will stay in orbit.

Since you can't carry a lot of expendable mass on a rocket, you have to throw that mass out the back at incredibly high speeds, hence you mix two chemicals that have an extremely volatile reaction in a chamber.  The chemicals violently react and expand with the result directed out the back with a nozzle.  The mass (which is probably a flaming gas by now) comes out the back at incredibly high speeds.

Answer 2

At it's simplest - rocket thrust pushes mass out one end so that the rest of the craft moves the other way.

There's about half a million lines of computer code that controls the space shuttle on ascent.  That's alot of detail.  But the main problems are controlling thrust direction and amount.

The Space Shuttle main engines, which are liquid oxygen/hydrogen, are ignited first.  When they're running, (but the craft is still bolted to the pad), the solid rocket boosters are fired up.  The craft is unbolted, and it goes up.  At some point, the solid rocket boosters run out of fuel, and they drop from the shuttle to be picked up in the ocean to be reused for another flight.  On orbit, the main engines are shut down, and the external tank is released - to burn up in the atmosphere.

Answer 3

Newton's third law for the booster rockets which are then jettisoned.

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The space shuttle itself just glides back down to Earth.