space girl comic
yes, you can make a rocket with nothing more than table sugar and fertiliser. makes sense if you think about it. sugar has a lot of energy, and potassium nitrate has oxygen, which are the main two ingredients you need for a big boom.
if you want to try this at home, maybe consider looking up some more detailed instructions online. don’t get your pyrotechnical advice from a comic strip, kids.
essentially, most rockets use liquid fuel, while most boosters strapped on the side of the rocket use solid fuel (like on the space shuttle). boosters are a cheap way of adding more “boom” to your rocket, but they’re so inefficient you probably don’t want to carry them all the way to space.
there’s also hybrid fuel (solid fuel + liquid oxygen) which i didn’t mention because not a lot of rockets use it, and 4 panels isn’t a lot of real estate. it’s sort of a compromise between the two, and its what virgin galactic use for the spaceshiptwo.
of course “liquid fuel” can mean any one of a whole bunch of very different chemicals (hydrogen, methane, kerosene, etc) but that’s a comic for another day.
helium-3 is theoretically useful for nuclear fusion (instead of fission), a technology which still isn’t yet viable, and even if it becomes so, it might just be cheaper and easier to build a bunch of solar panels and batteries on earth than set up a mining operation on the moon. still, it makes for a neat science fiction concept, which is something i guess.
and yes, technically i just made a sequel to the comic “helium” called “helium-3”. hire me, microsoft.
i hope people don’t expect me to do a comic about every element of the periodic table. chemistry jokes are hard.
according to my 100%-accurate-definitely-not-flawed understanding of causality, every mistake you’ve ever made is actually the big bang’s fault.
obviously this is a much more complex and interesting subject than i could possibly squeeze into a four panel comic, so i highly recommend you go watch the episode of ‘crash course astronomy’ on youtube about high mass stars.
also in case you thought i made a mistake with the timeline, no, a smaller star actually lasts much much longer than a larger star, as it’s much cooler and thus burns its fuel slower. while the largest stars we know of (hypergiants) last only millions of years, the smallest stars (red dwarfs) can last for trillions of years. seriously. trillions with a t.
i’ll probably do a comic about this some day, so i should shut up now before i spoil it.