Tangential, but Tyranny of the Rocket Equation [1]. The long and short is that your analogy is much better than you might have thought. Increasing rocket power

Tangential, but Tyranny of the Rocket Equation [1]. The long and short is that your analogy is much better than you might have thought. Increasing rocket power is definitely (and counter intuitively) not just a matter of scale. The reason is that you're surprisingly constrained in rocketry. You have three primary variables that aren't really all that variable: --- 1) deltaV - the change in velocity you need to reach your destination. this is completely fixed. for instance if you want to get into earth's orbit you need to be able to change your velocity by 8km/s regardless of any other variable. 2) specific impulse of your rocket - again this is mostly fixed. it can be improved by technological breakthroughs, but not by things like increasing scale. 3) fuel to mass ratio - what percent of your rocket is made up of fuel --- Any two define the third. deltaV constrains absolutely everything we can do, so we can set it as the goal. Specific impulse is not something that can be readily improved for the most part, so all you're left with is a fuel to mass ratio. And suffice to say making things bigger while making them hold an even larger ratio of fuel is not how things work. Also important is that based on our requirements for the first two variables, our effective fuel to mass ratio is already approaching very close to 100%. We of course take it all for granted now and SpaceX going up and softly autonomously landing back down, sometimes in the middle of the ocean on an autonomous barge, is increasingly starting to look almost mundane. But it's borderline miraculous we can achieve this, and indeed if Earth was just slightly larger (about a 50% greater diameter - just some 4,000 miles) it wouldn't even be possible for us to leave this planet with anything like current technology, regardless of how epic a scale we built upon. [1] - https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...