What is the escape velocity for Earth (or for any planet)? To answer this, we need to consider energy. If we think of the planet and the object as a closed system, then the total energy must be ...

For Earth, escape velocity is about 25,000 miles per hour. Fictional Planet has an escape velocity 68% higher. That’s 42,000 miles per hour.

I had an interesting thought, spurred on by a discussion I ran across online about firing guns in space. Apparently, smokeless powder contains its own ...

Humanity’s pursuit of longer life is moving from fiction to something far more real. At the heart of this shift is a bold ...

This speed is called the escape velocity. It takes a lot of fuel to reach that speed, which is why early rockets, like Apollo's Saturn V, were so big : They had to carry enough fuel to get to the ...

Whereas escape velocity from Earth is roughly 11 km/s, a rocket attempting to leave a Super-Earth similar to Kepler-20 b would need to achieve an escape velocity of ~27.1 km/s.

That is less than Earth’s escape velocity at that altitude, 10.8 kilometers per second, but the average conceals a wide range, so some hydrogen atoms still manage to break free of our planet’s ...

(This is an expanded version of an earlier post, taking into account escape velocity as well as surface gravity.) Earth-sized exoplanets have been very much in the news lately. In early November ...