"Stealth Pilot" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 10 Dec 2007 05:56:32 -0600, nick hull wrote:

In article ,
Stealth Pilot wrote:

navigation to the moon is a piece of cake. launch just before midnight
on a moonlit night and have the robot navigator stay focussed on the
large polarised dot of light in the sky and head for it.

Won't work; you cannot go directly to the moon, you have to go around
the earth because of gravity and the earth's rotation. In any case, it
will take several days to get there

Free men own guns - www(dot)geocities(dot)com/CapitolHill/5357/

can you tell me why a vehicle making a steady 100knots cant get to the
moon?
oil tankers traverse the world at 12 knots.

That's a good question and one worth the time it takes to understand it.
Look up "escape velocity" and you'll see the equations.

The short answer is that you couldn't carry enough fuel to escape gravity
that way. A projectile under power must achieve some very high percentage of
the Earth's escape velocity, which is roughly 11.2 km/sec. Otherwise your
fuel supply will never last. Once you've achieved escape velocity, that's
the velocity you should try to conserve on your trip to the Moon.

--
Ed Huntress