[masraum]

Originally Posted by Tervuren

It'd be interesting to see a video comparing a top fuel dragster to the space shuttle.
Unfortunately all the videos of a space shuttle launch I had ever seen were slow mo.
My mind was not wired for how short what I was about to see would be.
Seeing it in person, even if 10 miles away, wow.
It did not waste time getting to several hundred miles per hour, then it hit a cloud layer and went out of view.

The shuttle limits it acceleration for pilot and passenger comfort.
It'd be capable of more at full tilt.
Just amazing.

I don't actually think that what you see with the space shuttle is in slow motion, and it's not slow. It just looks slow because our brain doesn't fully appreciate the scale.

But yes, the acceleration is limited to 3G. It's still at least 2.25x faster than what the quickest street car can manage, but it doesn't begin to touch a drag launch which approaches 8G so almost 3x that of the space shuttle.

https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/466711main_AP_ST_ShuttleAscent.pdf <-- This link has a chart that shows the Time (s), Altitude(m), Velocity(m/s), and Acceleration(m/s2) over the first 520 seconds of the STS-121 launch.

I think the really impressive part is that it probably averages 2.5G of acceleration for minutes which gets it up to 17500mph.