I have read through a good portion of this thread and I would like to clear up a few technical points which continue to get confused regarding rockets.
First, I would like to state my current position regarding the existence of satellites and other space technologies.
I do not believe that there are orbiting satellites. I have however, seen many "iridium flares," which I call floaters, with my own eyes, and having observed them to the extent I have, I find it impossible to believe this phenomenon has been occurring throughout history considering that there is no accounting of it going back even as far as the 1930's that I am aware of. Therefore, I do believe that these floaters, are man-made objects, though I doubt they are "in orbit" and I am confident that their design is not as satellites supposedly are. I hope to eventually discuss my theories regarding what kind of object they actually are, but for now I will leave it at that.
I am also firmly convinced, that every application which is attributed to satellites, such as broadcast television, and gps are actually carried out through ground based technologies. In every case, the ground based option would make more sense from a business and technical point of view, and in most cases even if orbiting satellites were practically possible, the supposed applications attributed to them would not be.
Okay, now onto the analysis of rocketry:
Let us first consider the scenario of a rocket in a vacuum discounting all other practical considerations besides the physical mechanics of propulsion and thrust. Is the proposed mechanism viable? There is no denying under Newton's three laws of motion, in this entirely theoretic scenario that it is. The mechanism is this: there is an explosion of propellent within a chamber which produces force in all directions, in theory all these forces would cancel out except those which are pointing along the opposite vector of the chamber's opening. Along this vector there would be a positive force and so the rocket would move along this vector. It is the same mechanism as the recoil that occurs when a bullet is fired out of a gun. It has nothing to do with propellent pushing against air. The medium which the propellent is exiting into is irrelevant with regards to the most fundamental mechanics.
Now, if there is anyone out there who just felt a spark of hope that their science fiction fantasies may be real, unfortunately, that is where any sensibility in the design of rockets in space or the upper atmosphere comes to an end. For the second we begin to consider any practical reality beyond this fundamental mechanism of motion we will find that there are endless problems and reasons why the design of a rocket launching into space cannot work.
First, let us consider the most basic of these problems regarding a vacuum, that being, the lack of oxygen necessary to sustain combustion. In a vacuum, there is no oxygen, but combustion requires oxygen, consider for example, what happens when you put a glass seal over a burning flame. Now, the claimed work-around for this fact is that rocket fuel is claimed to be:
Now, I do not know enough about liquid oxygen to suggest that it would be impossible to create such a fuel, although the very idea of such a fuel strikes me as odd, but I will give this claim the benefit of the doubt that such a fuel exists and can be made useful for it's claimed purposes. However, even if such a fuel exists, it would not be possible to store it or utilize it when moving from the external pressures of conditions on the surface of Earth to a vacuum with near zero external pressure.either a high oxygen containing fuel or a mixture of fuel plus oxidant, whose combustion takes place, in a definite and controlled manner with the evolution of a huge volume of gas
To understand why this is a case, consider a basic law of pressure: when there is a pressure differential between the interior and exterior of a chamber, to reduce the exterior on the pressure of the chamber has the same effect as increasing the internal pressure of the chamber. Now, if these rocket fuel tanks are already highly pressurized to begin with on the surface of the Earth, how can these fuel tanks maintain functionality through radical change of external pressure, which are not claimed to be happening gradually I might add, but rapidly. The answer is that, they cannot, and were such a design practically implemented, the fuel tanks would explode due to the rapid drop in pressure before even reaching the upper atmosphere.
Furthermore, even if the tanks could somehow be designed to avoid exploding, the controlled release of their gases would become impossible, since as the external pressure decreases the force and velocity of gas exiting the tank would rapidly increase in the same way that to a tire can be deflated with control if there is a small hole, but if there is a large gash it's deflation cannot be controlled. This is especially damning to the space rocket design because the design is so dependent on near perfect control of fuel expenditure.
Were someone to suggest that rockets could be made to accelerate more gradually, I would say, the more gradually they would accelerate the more possible it would be to implement a design feature in the fuel tanks which could compensate the change in pressure.
If we were to add more layers of reality into this analysis then we would find many more problems and inconsistencies with the rocket narrative, but I would like to leave at this for now and to summarize.
The mechanism of a rocket moving in a vacuum on the basis of purely theoretic consideration of fundamental laws of motion is viable, but when considering additional practical realities such as external changes in pressure and the functionality of a pressurized fuel tank with near zero external pressure it becomes clear that the design would not be viable.