SpaceflightMemes

‘The thing we haven’t invented yet isn’t economically viable yet.’ Yeah, no shit.

I guess let’s just keep polluting our planet, because it’s cheaper.

The problem isn't so much new vehicle takes time, it's the bullshit spacex fanboys spout about every other rocket company for doing the same thing.

LEO reset does have merit, it just never gets away from the fundamental problem of lifting fuel into orbit.

I would really prefer a space travel dev approach that doesn't prioritize getting humans somewhere as the immediate goal. We already know we can shoot people to the moon and land them. We can use LEO to study problems of interplanetary travel such as prolonged weightlessness and confinement. I think we should be sending robots to the moon and Mars to mine and refine local material, print permanent structures, pressurize them and grow food in them. Then send people once they can just show up and live in them. Mere survival shouldn't be their main task.

The production lines are shut down and any custom tooling has had its materials reclaimed to make other things. The institutional knowledge, the little bits that never got written down in the blueprints or manufacturing instructions, it's all gone. The people who worked on that rocket and its components are dead or have been working on something else for the last 50 years. How well would you remember some little tidbit of information that you last needed half a lifetime ago?

Because a lot of "Released Engineering Documents" were just engineering notebooks, and each vehicle was different, even the parts that were supposed to be the same. There was a lot of "repair" versus "rework" disposition, and a "Just make it work; it only needs to work once" culture.

Basically, because it was a race against the Russians, and the Russians were winning.

Because tech evolved, we could do better now.

because they were insanely expensive

Because the nazis America brought in to build them are all dead.

https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/nasa-nazi-history-von-braun.html

Because it is based on obsolete technology. You wouldn't want to build a flight computer with hard-wired (as in literal wires) software, would you? A lot of it would also have to be reverse engineered, to the point where you might as well build a new vehicle.

After years of saying Starship can do 100 tons to LEO... 'Block 1's actual proven payload capacity is 'a banana'... not 50 tons.

Starship has never launched any actual payload to orbit.

Anyway, onto 'Block 2', that'll be able to do what 'Block 1' was aupposed to do, even though none of the contracts Musk's signed to develop Starship have any mention of different Blocks... but its ok because Block 3 will do 150 tons!

Just like how Hyperloop is an idea that makes any sense and will work.

Just like how FSD is will be complete and ready in 2017.

Just like how Solar Roof tiles are totally real and not completely fake.

Just like how Tesla cars will be able to fly with monopropellant thrusters.

Just like how Elon is a free speech absolutist except when people mock or disagree with him.

As with basically all of Musk's promises to shareholders and aspirations presented as facts at publicized events since about 2014... what Musk says is all almost entirely bullshit, and anyone would be a fool to take him at his word.

And knowing that everything Musk says has turned out to be total BS, who knows what the actual number is. So far no Starship has been to LEO and hasn't carried any payload. Sure the last one carried a banana and technically made it to orbital speeds before plunging back into the atmosphere. That's a long way from actually doing the thing and putting 50 tons into LEO.

delta v isn't really a issue if you have orbital refueling and frequent+cheap flights figured out (as long as a full tank can complete a trans Martian injection and orbital capture at mars) , so I'd say they're both similarly difficult:

on Mars you have to deal with the atmosphere, higher gravity, etc

on the moon you have to deal with the dusty surface, so you have issues with landing gear and landing engines kicking up dust

I saw a graph of our local gravity wells, the moon and Mars are surprisingly similar. The moon has many extra challenges that Mars does not. Propulsively landing on a dust pile is trickier than slowing down with aerobraking.