Space Exploration Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for spacecraft operators, scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Would having the exhaust of a rocket or air breathing engine in an early stage in close proximity to water on a horizontal launch provide more thrust? Could a rocket launch off water horizontally in stages us using water and air for lift to save fuel?
Side Question: Could a cushion of air between a rocket and water after a certain speed to create lift like this plane without wings?
If you launch horizontally, you'll build up speed while you are in the thickest part of the atmosphere. Pretty soon (around Mach 1, ~300 m/s), you have to start gaining altitude to prevent overheating due to atmospheric drag.
You'll also experience severe buffeting; aircraft that fly fast at low altitude need design features to reduce the vibration to acceptable levels.
Thrust is a force applied to an object that change its kinetic energy. In other words, it's the propulsive force. Usually measured in Newtons.
With a rocket engine, thrust goes up when pressure goes down because the differential pressure at the mouth of the nozzle is higher.
So no, thrust would in fact be lower than if the rocket gained altitude.
Obviously, this would not be the case of an air breathing engine. But that's not a rocket anymore.
Having the exhaust moving horizontally over water will not do anything useful for the rocket, the exhaust has pretty much done all the 'work' it is going to do for the rocket by the point it leaves the nozzle. There would probably be some fascinating shock diamond like effects in the air water interface but rocket is gone by that point so the physics details do not matter.
Going vertically the ground effect can have impact for rockets by making them partial ground effect vehicles, but it as per the ground effect wiki page it tapers off quickly based on your pressure generating area, which in a rocket is your engine diameter. So once you are two bell diameters clear of the ground any effect is gone. For serious liquid rockets the back pressure generated from the ground effect causes instability and other problems and is explicitly avoided by having flame trenches/deflectors to produce lots of clear space for the exhaust to move in.
For small (solid) rockets it is possibly to launch from a sealed tube for a slight performance boost, but generally only meaningful when time spent launching is a sizeable amount of the total flight time (aka short range weapons).
