Rocket science for the classroom
Printable worksheets and ready-to-teach lesson plans for ages 7–11. Every sheet has an answer key and prints on one or two pages.
No account, no email address, no adverts, and nothing to pay. Print them, copy them, use them in class.
Worksheets
Lesson plans
How we check the facts
Every number on this site — every altitude, mass, thrust figure and mission time — comes from a published source listed below. If a number cannot be traced to one of them, it does not go on the page. Making something simple enough for a child must not make it wrong.
One thing we deliberately correct
Most children’s material says there is no gravity in space. There is — about 88% of surface gravity at the space station, which you can work out from g = g₀ × (R ÷ (R + h))². Astronauts float because they are falling, and so is the station. We teach it that way because the myth has to be unlearned before orbits make any sense.
Privacy
There are no accounts, no adverts and nothing to sign up for. A child’s progress is stored only in their own browser and never leaves the device — we never see it.
We do use Google Analytics to count anonymous page visits, so we can see which pages actually help and which need rewriting. Advertising features are switched off: no remarketing, no ad personalisation and no Google Signals. We never ask for or collect a name, an email address or anything else that identifies a child. If your school blocks analytics, everything on this site still works exactly the same.
Our sources
- Falcon 9 Block 5 — specifications — Sourced spec table: dimensions, mass, stage thrust, payload capacity.
- Merlin rocket engine family — Per-engine thrust, specific impulse, chamber pressure, cycle, ignition.
- Dragon 2 (Crew Dragon) — Crew capacity, dimensions, SuperDraco/Draco, heat shield, parachutes.
- SpaceX Starship — Stacked height, Raptor counts, thrust, hot-staging, tower catch. Also: four stainless-steel grid fins at roughly 3 t each, four re-entry flaps, and a heat shield of about 18,000 hexagonal tiles rated to 1,400°C.
- Falcon 9 Block 5 mission timeline (Starlink Group 17-38) — Published T+ event times for a real Block 5 flight with booster recovery.
- Falcon 9 countdown timeline — Standard SpaceX countdown milestones from T-38 minutes.
- SpaceX CRS-9 press kit (NASA) — Official countdown poll, propellant load and engine chill milestones.
- International Space Station — Altitude, speed, orbital period, mass, size and crew.
- Kármán line — Where space is agreed to begin — and where different countries disagree.
- Extravehicular Mobility Unit — Spacesuit mass, life support duration and internal pressure.
- Saturn V — Height, thrust and payload of the Moon rocket.
- WMAP — mission overview — Cosmic microwave background at 2.725 K — the temperature of empty space.
- ISS Environmental Control and Life Support System — Oxygen by electrolysis (OGS/Elektron), CO2 removal, Sabatier, 101.3 kPa cabin.
- NASA achieves water recovery milestone on the ISS — 98% of the station’s water is recovered and reused — the water that becomes oxygen.
- NASA Space Place — Why is the sky blue? — Shorter blue wavelengths scatter most off air molecules. No air, no scattering.
- RP-1 (Rocket Propellant-1) — Density 0.81 g/mL, low-sulphur refining, coking on shutdown, Isp against hydrogen.
- NASA Science — Earth’s atmosphere, a multi-layered cake — Thermosphere temperature rises with altitude because molecule density is so low.
- Space exposure — human physiology in vacuum — Unconscious in 9-12 s, no rupture or instant freezing, Armstrong limit 19 km, ~90 s survivable.
- NASA — data sonifications: black holes — Perseus cluster pressure waves, 57 octaves below middle C, made audible in 2022.
- Escape velocity — Escape velocity from Earth’s surface: 11.186 km/s, about 40,270 km/h.
- NASA Science — Black holes — Event horizon definition; stellar vs supermassive; lightest known at 3.8 solar masses.
- Supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* — About 4 million solar masses, 26,000 light years away, at the centre of the Milky Way.
- Moon — Average distance 384,399 km — about 30 Earth-widths. Diameter 3,474 km. Surface gravity 1.62 m/s², one-sixth of Earth’s. Surface temperature ranges from 120°C to -171°C depending on sunlight.
- Mars — Diameter 6,779 km. Orbital perihelion 206.65 million km and aphelion 249.26 million km from the Sun.
- Earth — orbital distance from the Sun — Perihelion 147,098,450 km and aphelion 152,097,597 km — combined with Mars’s own orbit to find how far apart the two planets ever get.
- Hubble’s closest view of Mars, August 2003 — Mars at 55,757,930 km from Earth — the closest approach in almost 60,000 years.
- Apollo program — Six crewed Moon landings, 1969–1972. Twelve people walked on the Moon.
- Apollo 11 — First crewed Moon landing, 20 July 1969, reached after a three-day transit from Earth.
- Artemis II — Crewed lunar flyby — not a landing. Four astronauts, launched 1 April 2026, splashed down 10 April 2026.
- Mars rover — Five NASA rovers have landed on Mars: Sojourner (1997), Spirit and Opportunity (2004), Curiosity (2012), Perseverance (2021). Opportunity drove for 14 years, the longest of any of them.
- Perseverance (rover) — Launched 30 July 2020, landed 18 February 2021 after a roughly seven-month transit. Ingenuity made the first powered flight on another planet, 19 April 2021.
- Voyager 1 — Launched 5 September 1977; the most distant human-made object, over 25 billion km out. Entered interstellar space 25 August 2012.
- NASA: 10 things LRO is teaching us about the Moon — Diviner instrument measured -248°C at the bottom of Hermite crater, the coldest spot ever measured anywhere in the solar system.
- Atmosphere of Mars — Surface pressure about 610 Pa, 0.6% of Earth’s. Composition 95% carbon dioxide, 2.85% nitrogen, 2% argon. As thin as the air 35 km above Earth’s surface.
- NASA JPL: what sounds captured by Perseverance reveal about Mars — Low-pitched sound travels about 240 m/s on Mars and high-pitched sound about 250 m/s, against 343 m/s on Earth. Sound fades out within about 8 metres.
- Solar wind — A stream of charged particles (mostly protons and electrons) from the Sun’s corona, travelling at 250 to 750 km/s. Drives the aurora where it meets Earth’s magnetic field.
- Delta-v budget — Launch from Earth’s surface to low Earth orbit costs about 9.3–10 km/s once gravity and drag losses are included: 7.8 km/s of orbital speed plus roughly 1.5–2 km/s of losses. 9,400 m/s is the figure used across this site.
- Trans-lunar injection — The burn that sends a spacecraft from low Earth orbit toward the Moon costs about 3.2 km/s (Apollo’s own TLI burns ran 3.05–3.25 km/s). This is on top of the delta-v already spent reaching LEO, not instead of it.
- Delta-v budget: LEO to Mars transfer orbit — A typical (not minimal) burn from low Earth orbit onto a Mars transfer trajectory costs about 4.3 km/s, on top of the delta-v already spent reaching LEO.
- SpaceX Raptor — Raptor 2 (sea-level variant, per SpaceX’s own August 2024 figures): 230 tonnes-force (2,256 kN) thrust, 347 s specific impulse, 1,630 kg dry mass. Raptor Vacuum, the vacuum-optimised variant for Starship’s upper stage, reaches 380 s.
Found a mistake, or want a sheet on something else? Rocket School is built to be corrected — accuracy matters more here than tidiness.