![]() The starting speed of the spacecraft is listed at 5500 m/s.How far did the spacecraft travel during this burn? You can use non-relativistic kinematics if you like.Make a rough approximation of the mass of the spacecraft and the rocket equation to estimate the total mass of fuel in the rocket along with the exhaust speed.What is the kinetic energy of the spacecraft at the end of the rocket burn? If you assume all this energy came from the fusion process, how much fuel (mass) did it use? Hint: use the E = mc^2 to calculate the mass.Use the momentum principle along with relativistic momentum to calculate the final velocity of the spacecraft.Next I can use the acceleration and time to find the final velocity (based on the definition of acceleration). If it uses up 0.8 percent in four hours, it would take about 450 hours to run out of fuel (that's almost 19 days). The first thing to determine is the total burn time. This means that it went from 89.9 percent to 89.1 percent in four hours. The burn-rate for the fuel is constant.There are no other significant gravitational objects around to influence its motion.This wouldn't quite be true if the mass of the spaceship significantly decreased as it used fuel-but it's still a fine place to start. There is a constant acceleration of 10 g's (98 m/s 2).The spaceship starts with a speed of 5,500 m/s (yes, I'm assuming the mps means meters per second).However, I don't know everything so I'm going to have to guess at some stuff. You want to know how fast this ship ends up going after it runs out of fuel. ![]()
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