/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15860418
Pretty much

What went wrong?

>>12196684
SpaceX never started reusable rockets. Pretty much every space agency worth their salt wanted reusable launch systems for a while. It's just that a combination of the Shuttle set a bad standard for reusable launchers, and sudden spaceflight apathy from governments worldwide has stopped the pursuit. SpaceX just broke this barrier and relit interest in the concept.

>>12109197
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39AuRjJ0Gfs
Also known as the Collier's Space Ferry.

>>12085383
>hypergolic Starships

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39AuRjJ0Gfs

1952 Ferry Rocket:
Lift-off Mass: 7000 tons
Fuels: Hydrazine / Nitric Acid (+Hydrogen Peroxide for turbopumps)
# of engines: Stage I: 51 / Stage II: 34 / Stage III: 5 (total 90)
Up Cargo Mass: 36 tons to 1075-mile polar orbit
Flight Rate: 4 launches per day from 2 pads on Johnston Island
Stage 1&2 Recovery: Water landing, ribbon parachutes + solid rockets
Return to launch site in floating drydocks
Turn-Around Time: ~5 days
RV Configuration: Winged Canard, ~20deg sweepback on all surfaces
Thermal Protection: hot-structure, radiant cooling plus active refrigeration

When?

>>11924555
Anon already told you about the "politcal part", but consider also the following.
In 1979 a "computer" was kilometer of cable with special bit here and here to act as logic gate. It had less processing power than the chips inside a china RC toy. Chips and processor weren't a thing, so the only way to do anything complex up there was to have people up there.

THEN someone invented the Transistor and we cancelled Von Braun Weather-service rotating space station and his multistage supply ships.

And don't feel bad about it, because you need that level of automation if you want to mankind to rule space like God instead of like nerd with slide rule.
You could act as Houston for a dozen of simultaneous Apollo mission with the processing power of your average smartphones.

>>11571858
>Reminds me of Von Brauns old nazi engineering idea of making big staged rockets just by stacking scaled-up V2 rockets on top of one anothe
You mean this thing? IIRC it's also reusable.

>>7477435
Memedrive is fantasy space magic.

>>7477446
>You have to walk before you can run.
...or you can get a pile of people crawling around together to build a go-cart and drag it up a hill, so you can coast a little way at running speed, and not learn anything about walking or running, but claim that you accomplished the horizontal speed which is the immediate purpose of running, and therefore have made a huge achievement in the field of horizontal motion.

>Just getting to Mars, landing, taking off, and getting back to Earth would be a huge achievement.
It would be a huge expenditure. We can do it with minor ad hoc extensions of current technology, as Apollo was done. It would just be expensive and pointless.

Real progress in space would start with making launch much cheaper. If the idea was progress in manned spaceflight, they should have let von Braun work on his reusable rockets, and treat it honestly as a long-term endeavor, starting at a small scale, with failure, competition, and change of approach expected along the path from the equivalent of the Wright Flyer to the equivalent of the jet airliner.

>>7477473
>the whole idea of "putting a man on the moon" was only carried out to increase funding for space programs in general.
That's some nonsense you've got there.