Lol, the last time NASA built a space plane to do real work in space, it was grossly inefficient than the previous giant dick it replaced, wildly more dangerous, and NASA had to attach it to three other dicks just to get it to space.
Face it man, people making fun of dick shaped rockets are seeing dicks where no one else is seeing them and calling themselves clever.
Are fucking serious? Have you built anything significant?
This is a very empirical view, not a superstition. If you want to learn more about this, and aren't just trolling look at the development of the A4 Skyhawk, the lunar lander, the space shuttle ... hell, any well documented large system.
I wish I could reach through the internet and smack you in the head for such a stupid comment.
Building a rocket that is hard to launch and costs a fortune is a boondoggle.
Talented scientists and engineers can waste their time building the wrong thing.
It's kinda like saying that most of the legwork in space exploration goes into space ships and mission logistics so just building a dumb launcher rocket is far more tractable problem.
Indeed, building Saturn V is nothing compared to flying men to the Moon and back. Does not mean you can build a Saturn V from scratch. And people who are promising to teach you how either are geniuses or just in denial.
I don't think you understand the breadth of rocket science, material science or the convexification of the mathematical model required to do what spacex does. While this is very cool and pretty, it's still an advanced toy.
How is that funny? Compared to previous times it seems there aren't that many groundbreaking programs, from what we can see. Most of aviation innovation is suppressed by market demands - we want tried and true, low-risk designs. This is in stark contrast to the 50s-80s.
Space is a fairly small market, but has some stuff going on. Nothing on the scale of the space race era. Even in the 90s they were talking about how space launches would become so routine. Then, if you launched a mission it was likely 70% new tech, procedures, or experiments. Now all the missions build off of previous ones. Hey, look a new space telescope! Been there, done that, barely makes the news.
Defense is a wildcard since the interesting stuff is classified. There are some interesting problems in the DARPA competitions. Not a lot of freedom in those jobs - lots of politics usually.
So after the ISS and Space Shuttle, what we really need is an inefficient, pointless white elephant to get things going again. Because those two other big pointless white elephants weren't big enough, or white enough. Or something.
What we need to get the public interested in space is realistic, achievable worthwhile goals. 'Building stuff in space' isn't a worthwhile goal in itself, hence the ISS is a waste of resources. Building rocket ships so they look cool isn't worthwhile either, hence the appalling inefficiency of the shuttle programme.
At last we're going back towards projects and goals that are based on actual honest to goodness good engineering, like capsules for manned space flight and Planetary Resources' sober plans for asteroid resource recovery. This is not a bad thing! The space cadets had their day and they blew it badly. Time for some proper commercial engineering to have it's chance.
It seems off-target to get an emotional response from pointing out that millions of people have a slightly wrong picture of what a Saturn V rocket looked like. This is trivia. Most of those people aren't rocket engineers. Having a better idea of what it looked like would help you draw one slightly more accurately, and that's it.
It doesn't help us understand how much important knowledge was lost by the people who really should know how to do it. It seems like SpaceX is doing okay?
The problem here is that there is no good reason to build this large rocket. There are already rockets capable of launching humans and lunar expeditions into space from American soil. NASA and the government are wasting precious resources by duplicating that capability.
The usual justification given is that big rockets are needed for lunar expeditions. But that is not correct - you can easily just launch more of already existing rockets. Apollo only used Saturn V since there was so little time and so little experience in orbital rendezvous, which turned out to be possible quite easily. There's also a reason why the Saturn V was not flown beyond the Skylab mission or why no more were built. It was just too expensive and only few payloads would justify using it.
If american space policy was more rational, it could achieve much more in a shorter period of time.
In an industrial sense, the F-1 tests are always interesting and probably don't cost a lot of money. The engine was not that advanced, a normal, if big, gas generator kerosene engine.
The same "ancient artifacts", could be said from the NK-33 engines, that were built in the seventies in the Soviet Union but are going to fly this year in Orbital Science's brand new Antares rocket to resupply the ISS. The engines are still state of the art high pressure oxidizer rich staged combustion with thrust to weight rates of around 100.
In what other field can you reach such levels of technological advance that they stand unsurpassed forty years later?
some people think the goal of kerbel space program is to launch rockets into space ... i think its to have them fail in hilarious fashion. we are not the same.
See my above comment, you and a bunch of other commenters are making wildly incorrect assumptions about a huge list of things.
It might surprise you that the Engineers running the current leader in space flight (tonnage to orbit, reliability, reusability, cost, pick your metric) aren't complete idiots.
There is something ironical in there in that Rocket Lab itself also wants to put more stuff in orbit, so they are complaining against the very thing they try to achieve.
These people aren’t dumb. I am pretty sure they went through a lot of options before settling on a design. Keep in mind that a lot of space devices are outdated by the time they are being deployed.
Absolutely. A lot of back-patting and inside jokes about 40 years of building expensive space systems that often failed. Self-aggrandizing crap about how “space is hard”. Space was hard in the 60s when you had to invent microprocessors to get off the ground. It’s well understood and should be common and cheap now (at least for Earth orbiting systems). This old boys club nonsense might feel fun but space is changing, access is becoming easy, and anyone that tries to spend 10 years and a billion dollars on a project won’t last long.
Face it man, people making fun of dick shaped rockets are seeing dicks where no one else is seeing them and calling themselves clever.
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