Speed of The Space Shuttle

The space shuttle is so fast that many humans are unable to comprehend it without an illustration of how fast it goes. Imagine that you are running on one of the moving walkways found in large airports. The walkway is doubling your speed and it is on top of the fastest jet ever made that is going its top speed and the jet had a several hundred mile an hour head wind. The wind whipping through your hair (if you were somehow miraculously able to stay on) would be a fairly accurate representation of the speed of the space shuttle, but it still would not be 17500 miles an hour.

Space Shuttle Speed Explanation

The reason the space shuttle is able to go that fast is because there is very little gravity and friction in space, which allows it to use the entire thrust as speed. None of the thrust gets turned into maintaining the speed of the space shuttle. This means that if there was a hypothetical pathway with minimal gravity that a shuttle with an unlimited amount of fuel, you would be able to go an unlimited amount of speed, provided that your craft and body were able to withstand it.

The space shuttle although one of the fastest vehicles that we have, would still take quite a while to travel to the sun. However, if there were enough fuel to power the space shuttle for the entire journey, the shuttle would be able to reach the sun in a reasonable amount of time. Sending a probe to the sun would give us some valuable information about the composition of the universe and give us more understanding about it.