![]() The two rockets start from rest at the same time, but the Falcon 9 has a realistic acceleration and the Buzz Lightyear spacecraft has a motion based on the trailer. Here is a model I made in Python showing the Buzz Lightyear rocket and the SpaceX Falcon 9, both approximately to scale. I'll answer this question with another animation. (Plus, it's Buzz Lightyear, so he's probably tougher than your average fighter pilot.)īut now for the most important question: Why would the animators of Lightyear choose to create such an unrealistic launch? I mean, there are plenty of real-life launches that could be used as a basis for a cool animation, so it's not like they don't know what one should look like. Some fighter pilots can have maneuvers that pull up to 9 or 10 g's. If you were instead aboard the Crew Dragon as it was launched into space, you have an acceleration of 0.5 g's-but it would actually feel like 1.5 g's, because the Earth would still be pulling down on you until the rocket reached escape velocity.īuzz Lightyear, on the other hand, would experience 8.9 g's. An acceleration of 1 g is the equivalent of a human being stationary on the surface of the Earth (where g = 9.8 m/s 2). What would that feel like? We can think about accelerations in terms of g-forces. Putting in a change in velocity of 192 m/s and a time interval of 2.5 seconds gives an acceleration of 78 m/s 2-which is a little bit more than the acceleration of the Falcon 9 rocket. This means that a rocket traveling upward would accelerate and not just travel at a constant velocity. Normally, a rocket engine produces a thrust force that is greater than the gravitational force. The only force remaining will be the thrust from the engines, so the speed of the spaceship should increase.īut … this isn't how real rockets work. And once the rocket gets beyond the atmosphere, there will no longer be air resistance, because there won’t be any air. That’s because moving farther from the center of the Earth means that the strength of the gravitational force pulling on the ship decreases. Air resistance is caused by the collisions between the rocket and the air.Īs the spacecraft leaves the ground, both of these forces will eventually become insignificantly small. The other two forces on the spacecraft are the downward-pulling gravitational force due to its interaction with the Earth, and an air resistance force pushing in the opposite direction as the ship. (The nice thing about rocket engines is that they work both in Earth's atmosphere and in space, where there is no air.) All forces come in pairs, so when the exhaust is ejected from the engine, it pushes the rocket in the opposite direction. A conventional chemical engine combusts propellants to create exhaust gasses. First, there's the thrust from the engines. In the case of Buzz's rocket, there are essentially three force interactions during this part of the motion. The engine will keep pushing the spaceship to overcome that pull and keep it moving at a constant speed, so it won’t fall back to Earth. But that’s not a problem, because you don’t need to worry about escape velocity if you have a rocket. Remember, we calculated that it’s moving at 192 meters per second. That apple will escape.īuzz Lightyear’s rocket is fast-but not that fast. Then it will get high enough such that the gravitational force won’t be strong enough to stop it. Eventually, thanks to the pull of gravity, it will stop and then start falling back toward Earth.īut let’s say the apple is moving super fast, at 11.186 kilometers per second. (That’s fairly fast for an apple.) As that apple moves upward, it’s going to slow down. Suppose you take an apple and toss it up in the air with a velocity of 10 meters per second. Let me give a brief overview of escape velocity. That means I can get both x and y positions as a function of time from the video. Since the video changes frames at regular intervals, 24 frames per second, each new frame is 1/24 of a second after the previous one. Then, after advancing to the next frame, I can find the object’s new position. If I know the size of an object in the scene, I can scale the video to get an actual position of the object, or its x and y values. The main idea behind video analysis is to look at the position of an object in each frame of a video. This makes it a perfect case for video analysis. Since the "camera" view is far away, you can see a good bit of the rocket’s motion. (OK, I don't even know what's real anymore.)īut I do know that in the trailer for the movie, which is going to be released next summer, they show Buzz launching in his spacecraft, presumably from Earth. This is about the real Buzz Lightyear that the toy is based on. This is an animated film about Buzz Lightyear. I know it's just a movie, and not even a live-action one-but the trailer for Lightyear compels me to analyze it.
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