Long, long ago Apollo 11 went to the moon.
A young rock group sings of how, long before they were born, Apollo 11 went to the moon. It makes me feel my age. I am of the Apollo generation. As a one time SF youngster I imagined that naturally by the year 2,000 we would be on Mars, but since then man stopped going beyond the area around earth. Even so, commercial use has certainly come close to home. We see major league baseball on satellite TV and cars have GPS car navigation systems. Surely we have to agree that we have benefited from space development.
Now, space rockets carrying people means the space shuttle.
From the space shuttle Endeavor Mr. Mori sent a message that looking down on earth, the irreplaceable homeland of the human race, he wishes in future to contribute to solving earth's environmental problems. The wonderful thing about humans going into space is that people can rediscover their own home planet.
Energy to carry the shuttle into space is 150,000 eu.
To recall how the shuttle rises from the launch pad, an airplane shaped orbiter sits like a cicada on a large rufous rocket shaped cylinder and on both sides are thin rockets painted white. The large cylinder is an energy tank (ET) which contains 103 tons of liquid hydrogen and 616 tons of liquid oxygen which are burned in the three main engines on the end of the orbiter. The two thin rockets are solid rocket boosters (SRB)containing 502 tons each of solid fuel.
The solid fuel is a mixture of ammonium perchlorate (70%) and aluminum powder(16%) solidified in butadiene synthetic rubber. Some 70% of the thrust power for take off is furnished by the SRB. The SRBs help lift the shuttle about 46 km from earth in two minutes and then are decoupled and land in the ocean with parachutes and are retrieved and reused several times.
After that the shuttle continues to accelerate using only its main engines and nine minutes after takeoff the ET is detached and discarded. The shuttle continues to position itself and correct its orbit using the many small engines located on the orbiter and finally becomes a full fledged satellite. After that it can orbit the earth without more fuel.
According to NASA, the energy created by the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen in the space shuttle's liquid fuel tanks is 68 kcal per 16 grams of oxygen. Calculations based on the amount of oxygen in the tank (617 tons), give 2.7 billion kcal. In addition to this, the amount of energy (calorific value) of the solid fuel is about one tenth of the liquid fuel so that the total energy required to put the space shuttle in orbit is roughly three billion kcal.
Expressed in terms of ecological units (eu), this comes to 1,500,000 eu, or enough food energy to sustain 1,500,000 people for a day. Now, if we calculate the energy required to carry the shuttle to 300 km above the earth, based on the earth's gravity, we get roughly one tenth of this or 150,000 eu. So we see that present day rocket engine's fuel efficiency is roughly 10%. By comparison, the automobile's energy efficiency is 15% to 20% and SLs (steam locomotives) is 5% to 8%.
Development of the next generation spaceplane has begun.
For a rocket to become an artificial satellite, it must attain a speed of roughly 8 km persecond (First astronautical velocity). The space shuttle has a low orbit, but sending up a stationary satellite to 36,000 km or leaving earth and going to the moon requires speeds of 11 km per second (Second astronautical velocity). As we see, space rocketry is at a point where, if we consider human technology and materials and the earth's gravity and atmospheric conditions, we can just barely make it into space. It is because we only barely make it that we use three stages and supplementary engines and only then finallyreach space.
In order that more people can go into space, it is necessary to have new technology for next generation energy saving models. Japan also has begun development of a fully reusable space craft, spaceplane which can take off from an airport and use air efficiently to get into space and return to earth.
by Shinji Yagi

Reference&Cooperation:

National Space Development Agency of Japan www.nasda.go.jp/
Kennedy Space Center www.ksc.nasa.gov/
Zusetsu Uchu Kogaku Gairon (Illustrated Space Engineering Outlined) by Nobuo Iwasaki,pub.
Maruzen Planet 1999 Space Guide 1999 ed. Young Astronauts Club-Japan, pub. Maruzen, 1999