aerospace · runs in your browser
Delta-v is a rocket's whole speed budget — spend it climbing, spend it steering, and when it's gone, it's gone. Drag the masses and watch how far the same hardware can reach.
Total delta-v
9,492m/s
Just barely enough to reach a low orbit — 92 m/s of margin, which a real flight would eat on the way up.
Turn on the second stage to see what dropping empty tanks is worth.
How far that gets you
What you are lifting
The rocket equation, stage by stage
Delta-v grows with the logarithm of the mass ratio: the propellant at the bottom has to accelerate all the propellant above it, so each extra tonne buys less speed than the last — which is why dropping an empty stage, instead of dragging its dead tanks along, is worth more than simply filling bigger tanks.
Simplified on purpose. This is the ideal rocket equation only — no drag, no gravity losses, no steering or throttling. Real climbs bleed roughly 1.5–2 km/s on the way up, which is already folded into the mileposts above, so treat every number here as a back-of-the-envelope teaching figure rather than a flight plan.
rocket-equation · sloprun.dev