Who wants to go to space?!

Unfortunately getting anything to break free from the inexorable pull of Earth’s gravity requires a startling amount of power and fuel, as objects must reach escape velocity around (25,000 miles an hour) to break orbit. But just how much juice does it take to blast a thing into space? Say a watermelon, or the Statue of Liberty? Using the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, we were able to calculate just how much fuel it would take to shoot some random objects away from Earth. Thanks to Wolfram Alpha we were even able to find some handy size comparisons that make the struggle all the more real. Check out Atlas Obscura’s above guide to escaping the Earth!