Multistage Rocket - Advantages

Advantages

The main reason for multi-stage rockets and boosters is that once the fuel is exhausted, the space and structure which contained it and the motors themselves are useless and only add weight to the vehicle which slows down its future acceleration. By dropping the stages which are no longer useful, the rocket lightens itself. The thrust of future stages is able to provide more acceleration than if the earlier stage were still attached, or a single, large rocket would be capable of. When a stage drops off, the rest of the rocket is still traveling near the speed that the whole assembly reached at burn-out time. This means that it needs less total fuel to reach a given velocity and/or altitude.

A further advantage is that each stage can use a different type of rocket motor each tuned for its particular operating conditions. Thus the lower stage motors are designed for use at atmospheric pressure, while the upper stages can use motors suited to near vacuum conditions. Lower stages tend to require more structure than upper as they need to bear their own weight plus that of the stages above them, optimizing the structure of each stage decreases the weight of the total vehicle and provides further advantage.