Week 24: The Current Frontier

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This week we don't add anything brand new — instead we pull together everything from Weeks 9, 13, 14, and 17 into one complete flight profile, the same kind of analysis used on today's most ambitious rockets, from Artemis to Starship.

History

Today's leading rocket programs — NASA's Artemis missions and SpaceX's Starship among them — still rely on exactly the same fundamentals this series has built up week by week: powered ascent, coast, apogee, and controlled descent, just at a far larger and more complex scale.

Forces

A full flight profile chains together powered ascent (Week 9), coast phase (Week 13), apogee (Week 14), and descent (Week 17) into one continuous picture of the entire flight.

Math

combined multi-phase profile — work through each week's formula in sequence, using the output of one phase as the input to the next, to build a complete predicted flight timeline.