Elon Musk, CEO, SpaceX and Tesla (Code Conference 2016)
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How to Escape the Gravity of the Earth
There's no such thing as an escape altitude. There's only an escape velocity. You need to be a certain speed to escape the gravity of the Earth. In order to get to orbit, all that matters is your horizontal velocity. Your altitude doesn't really matter. And so when the rocket is going to orbit, the only reason it's going off is to get out of the thick part of the atmosphere. At high velocity the atmosphere is thick as molasses. But if you look at a long exposure of the rocket's trajectory, you'll see it goes up but immediately curves over and starts going horizontal.
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