Space shuttle's liftoff: A didactical model

Abstract

The pedagogical aim of the present paper, thought for an undergraduate audience, is to help students to appreciate how the development of elementary models based on physics first principles is a fundamental and necessary preliminary step for the behaviour of complex real systems to be grasped with minimal amounts of math. In some particularly fortunate cases, such models also show reasonably good results when are compared to reality. The speed behaviour of the Space Shuttle during its first two minutes of flight from liftoff is here analysed from such a didactical point of view. Only the momentum conservation law is employed to develop the model, which is eventually applied to quantitatively interpret the telemetry of the 2011 last launches of Shuttle Discovery and Shuttle Endeavour.