Escaping Earth's Gravity

[nailit]

Can anyone explain to me (without posting links...often cant understand links) how NASA footage shows us escaping Earth's gravity very slowly with rather tall rockets on take off (Apollo missions etc).

Most of us have experienced escaping Earth's gravity by a *horizontal* take of in a plane and then slowly climbing as speed increases.

And most of us have experienced a (bonfire night) rocket, taking off *vertically* , at great speeds in order to get in to the air.

Common sense tells me that something tall (ie, a rocket,) will fall flat on its face if it isnt blasted off at enough force, so why do all the space programmes that I see, show impossible take offs?

[EDDIE51]

Rockets could become obsolete if we can produce a 'Space Elevator'
Sorry for a 'link' but it is easy to understand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
The only problem with this is that so far there is no material strong enough to make the 'teather'. If we can crack that it will work

[fizixx]

First of all, the "bonfire" rockets are millions and millions of times lighter than a real NASA rocket! So, it takes very little energy to get them moving.

A real rocket is incredibly massive, and if I'm not mistaken there are balancing systems aboard the ship that tell the engines to fire more/less to help keep the rocket going in the right direction.

It takes an amazing amount of energy to get a large craft like that moving, and there's only so much fuel you can place into a rocket and still get it off the ground. It does move faster the higher the rocket goes because the earth's gravitational force decreases with height AND the mass of the fuel gets used up making the whole ship lighter.