Space Shuttle

[Anonymous No.10316922]

Was it a mistake?
My impression is that it was basically a particularly dangerous payload fairing with only the advantage of being able to recover a satellite from orbit, but I'm prone to enjoying tales of folly and it seems as though it was somewhat more efficient than I first thought. (with the expendable external tank not representing that much of an expense all-considered.)

Would the US have been better sticking with expendable launch systems? Or was it a case that anything but the shuttle would have been politically unviable and an undesirable engineering solution to a political problem kept US manned space activity going at a time when it would otherwise have been cancelled?

[Anonymous No.10316927]

It was a failed attempt at being reusable, it had to be completely rebuilt by hand for every flight. It was great for learning about space planes and what not to do, but the shuttle was right to be retired.

[Anonymous No.10316936]

a shuttle is a helpful item to have in a spacefleet, the concept is sound and should be revived

I think overall NASA did okay with it though, the space station and hubble would be the notable achievements.

[Anonymous No.10316993]

>>10316922
>Was it a mistake?
Yes
Development and total program costs of Shuttle over the 30 years it operated would have allowed us to launch multiple Saturn V rockets per year over those same 30 years plus the down time between the cancellation of Apollo and the actual start of the Shuttle era.
If we just evolved our Apollo era vehicles or even just used the exact same ones continuously we would have been able to do shit like Moon bases and Mars missions by the 80's. A station with the same mass as the ISS could be built in 5 launches of the Saturn V, and with an upgraded Saturn V using HG-3 engines on the 2nd stage and NERVA on the third we could probably do it in two or three, not to mention get some BIG ass interplanetary probes launched.
The timeline in which Apollo wasn't cancelled and Shuttle was never developed is the one during which we had orbiters around all the gas giants by 1990, an orbiter around Pluto in 2000, landed a probe on Mercury's north pole in 1995, put a blimp probe into Venus' atmosphere, had a Moon base with room for 25 by 1980, a flag on Mars in the 1980's, a flag on Phobos and Deimos plus a Mars base by the 1990's, and by now a flag on Callisto.

[Anonymous No.10316996]

>>10316936
>space station and hubble
Did not depend on Shuttle or a vehicle like Shuttle to be launched, except by design.

[Anonymous No.10317005]

>>10316922
>with the expendable external tank not representing that much of an expense all-considered
Actually the tank alone on the Shuttle cost more than an entire expendable Falcon 9 flight, which is capable of putting more payload into orbit than Shuttle could.

[Anonymous No.10317011]

>>10316936
>should be revived
It is. Just without the need for meatbags.

[Anonymous No.10317032]

>>10316927
It would have worked, but Congress got to it.
Entire portions of the plans got changed just so congressmen could get parts made in their districts, preferably from existing manufacturers.
If they had been allowed to build it according to the original specs, we could be seeing launch costs today of pennies to the kilo.

[Anonymous No.10317077]

>>10317032
don't forget the airforce having them modify the design so that it was big enough for their spy satellites and capable of launching, orbiting once, stealing a soviet satellite and then landing stateside.

then barely ever using the shuttle for launches and never using it to grab a soviet satellite.

[Anonymous No.10317166]

>>10316993
>In 1969, United States Vice President Agnew chaired the National Aeronautics and Space Council, which discussed post-Apollo options for manned space activities.[1] The recommendations of the Council would heavily influence the decisions of the administration. >The Council considered four major options:
>A human mission to Mars
>follow-on lunar program
>A low earth orbital infrastructure program
>Discontinuing manned space activities
>Based on the advice of the Space Council, President Nixon made the decision to pursue the low earth orbital infrastructure option. This program mainly consisted of construction of a space station, along with the development of a Space Shuttle. Funding restrictions precluded pursuing the development of both programs simultaneously, however. NASA chose to develop the Space Shuttle program first, and then planned to use the shuttle in order to construct and service a space station.

[Anonymous No.10317170]

>>10317166
but how does this put jobs in my district?

[Anonymous No.10317174]

>>10317170
Go to bed, Jeff.

[Anonymous No.10317194]

[Anonymous No.10317203]

>>10317011
underrated post.

[Anonymous No.10317207]

>>10317194
>this could have been the future
>instead we got corruption and miscellaneous jewry stopping everything dead cold for half a fucking century

[Anonymous No.10317213]

>>10317207
anon
that could have been the past

[Anonymous No.10317325]

>>10316922
It was never designed as a cost efficient launch system, the SS started as a military project.

[Anonymous No.10317690]

>>10316922
They tried to replace a super expensive vehicle which cost 1.2 billion at launch with a cheaper alternative and ended up building a vehicle that cost 1.5 billion per launch. Then they stuck with that for 30 years.
That‘s really all you need to know.

[Anonymous No.10317719]

>>10317207
Amen to that brother, what a fucking travesty. I could be shitposting from Ganymede rn.

[Anonymous No.10317754]

Had the STS been replaced with the X-33 in the late 90s/early 00s everything would have been fine. That Congress killed the X-33 is exactly what led to all of our current problems. The shuttle itself is fine, it served the role it could serve given the era in which it was built. It's the follow up that's been a total screw up.

Also this >>10317325, remember that the STS's origins lay in the X-20. The USAF really, really, really wanted an orbital shuttle of their own and would eventually get it in the early 2000s via the X-37. Which should be the most upsetting part: NASA could have built their own X-37, especially when they did all the prototype work with the Dreamchaser, but Congress wouldn't fund it.

This isn't a problem with the STS itself as it is Congress making bad decisions.

[Anonymous No.10317771]

>>10317754
>X-33

Absolute fucking meme, there is a reason no one is pursuing SSTO Hydrogen spaceplanes, outside of dream chaser which another huge meme, because they are dogshit.

[Anonymous No.10317776]

Will the SLS meme ever actually fly?

[Anonymous No.10317779]

>>10317776
probably, at some point. WHAT it'll fly is the better question.

[Anonymous No.10317781]

>>10317776
It has to fly at least once whether or not it explodes on the pad is a whole other issue. I highly doubt it will see more than one flight though. Also didn't once of the main cunt senators backing this trash fire get shitcanned?

[Anonymous No.10317793]

>>10317779
It'll take a single load of fuel up to a Starship.

[Anonymous No.10317796]

Nixon administration officials knew that the shuttle would not be economical even before they approved it in early 1972. T.A. Heppenheimer, in his 1999 book The Shuttle Launch Decision, quoted one unnamed official saying “No one believed all the fancy economics and no one believed the mission model. I think they were on hemp when they were talking about sixty flights per year.” (Heppenheimer p. 370–372) But the administration’s reasoning was that NASA needed a program after Apollo, and California needed the jobs. However, even if true, NASA officials continued to tout the shuttle’s economics, and its projected high flight rate, for the next decade, with very few people noticing, or caring, that the numbers were bogus.

[Anonymous No.10317808]

>>10317754
X-33 was an awful design by itself, just like STS

[Anonymous No.10317813]

>>10317207
What happened to us?

[Anonymous No.10317814]

Kino design, shame it was so inefficient

[Anonymous No.10317817]

>>10317207
You'd still be a loser, except this time you'd be a space loser. And space would be normal to you so you probably wouldn't appreciate it.

[Anonymous No.10317820]

>>10317207
Friend, this could have been half a century in the past.

[Anonymous No.10317824]

>>10317813
a mixture of cost (even though it was not insurmountable or incompatible with other projects), lack of strong and practical motivation, a backlog of problems built up through the past, and the end of modernist idealism.
if you want to embody it in an event it's the 1973 oil crisis, even though in the case of space exploration and choosing to go with a shuttle in particular, a lot of the big decisions had been planned earlier than that.

[Anonymous No.10317857]

>>10317166
In reality option 4 was picked but didn't go through entirely because of NASA and the space crowd fighting tooth and nail.

[Anonymous No.10317877]

>>10316922

More to the point, how do you guys feel about the fact that the Apollo missions was a high tide in space exploration that will never be matched?

There is never going be another manned moon mission, let along the Mars Base meme. Over the next 100 years there's just going to be a dwindling set of unmanned probes and space telescopes.

Its not just you guys, but the the whole world is going into slow economic decline, a fact that technological progress will not be able to compensate for sufficiently. By the year 2119 most of Europe and all of north America will will have attained or be very close to Brazil 2.0 tier status. Forget about anyone else doing anything of merit in space. The Chinese are a flash in the pan, purchasing moon missions off the back of cheap t-shirts. They ride on your coat tails, and so their little boom will not last past your decline.

[Anonymous No.10317913]

>>10317877
its fine.
manned spaceflight beyond LEO is not worth it at this point. probes have a little more value, likr the B612 probe, GPS satellites and so forth. but these constant mission to verify if mars has water, had life, seismic activity and so forth, are not, and neither are human feet on thr planet.
but by your pessimistic outlook, we wont be launching satellites either.

[Anonymous No.10317985]

>>10316993
It unironically hurts. SLS probably will never get to the moon and Musk will only do things that boost PR

[Anonymous No.10318004]

>>10316996
Sure, and there were other ways to do lunar missions, such as EOR. Does that make Apollo and the Saturn V a mistake?

>>10316996
Yeah 20teens technology is better than 1980's technology. I'm not sure making that comparison tells us much.

>>10317032
Perhaps more damaging was the Proxmiring of the budget, over and over again.

>>10317077
>never using it to grab a soviet satellite.

...that we know of.

[Anonymous No.10318011]

>>10317877
I think you are wrong. Barring an unanticipated collapse, China will at least set boots on the moon, if for nothing else than bragging rights. The question will be whether that is viewed as a challenge by the west, spurring government commitment to space flight.

[Anonymous No.10318017]

>>10317813
Kennedy brilliantly sold the expensive manned space program as a critical race with the Soviets, then focused it into race to the moon. This got the program enough support and funding to carry out the program that might otherwise never have happened.

But what do you do after a race is over? You either won or you lost, but in either case you stop running. The Soviets went into LEO stations, and the US, with no unified vision for what next, went into STS which got Proxmired down to another LEO-limited system.

Contributing factors were social pressures to "spend money on problems here at home, not wasting it spending it in space"* and Nixon's ambivalence about a program and vision originating from Kennedy.

* In actuality, of course, nobody has ever spent any money in space.

[Anonymous No.10318098]

>>10318017
>>10317813
I get the impression space exploration has a cost-benefit problem. Maybe even a cost-benefit-media problem.
Even if you've got pro-space politicians, there are basically two types of missions you can do:
1. Missions in LEO that nobody really cares about, but which are cheap enough to be politically feasible, even factoring in the risk of budget overruns or unpredicted issues
2. Missions beyond LEO that might actually get people's attention, but which cost too much to be politically feasible considering the risk of budget overruns or unpredicted issues
(Oversimplified somewhat since there's some crossover with manned-vs-unmanned. I mean, people gave some attention to the Mars rover but realistically manned missions are what grab the general public, even if scientifically and safety wise there's still a good case for bombarding places with probes instead)
I mean even if you've got a pro-space exploration audience, asking congress for the equivalent of the budget of the USMC to send 5 guys on a holiday to Mars is going to be a hard sell.

With Apollo you had the advantage of front-loading the commitment. "We're going to space, give me money." rather than "We'd like to go here, do you like this idea enough to fund it?" Failure to put a man on the moon would have been a humiliating climb down. I'm not sure how you'd recreate that today. Maybe the race with the Soviet Union was indispensable, or maybe it would just take the political courage (or madness) to make it a major part of your presidential program to put a man on Mars, or back on the moon, or something else flashy.

[Anonymous No.10318116]

>>10318098
>2. Missions beyond LEO that might actually get people's attention, but which cost too much to be politically feasible considering the risk of budget overruns or unpredicted issues

Plus one other issue, which you can see in the Apollo program. A politician starts an ambitious program, but it does not come to fruition during his term -- why seriously put in the work to make it happen, if Nixon gets his name on the moon? Simpler to just announce some goal, but not do anything with it -- you get the press conference, and the meeting with space employees in key electoral states, but don't have to use political capital on something that will not happen until you are out of office.

[Anonymous No.10318122]

>>10318098
"Flashy" is a problem though. It's too easy for your opponents and for the press to spot something that is being done just for the flash. You need to be able to point to, and articulate, why it is in the national interest to do it. Kennedy could do that with the Soviets -- although the "missile gap" was largely non-existent, the public and most elected officials believed it was, or at least that they could not risk assuming the contrary. So while the Space Race was sold with a lot of sizzle in terms of "we choose to do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard," and manifest destiny in space and pioneers and explorers, but the meat backing the sizzle was "we can't let the Soviets get more advanced rocket and missile tech than we have, and we can't let them be standing on top of the well while we are standing in the bottom, in case a rock fight breaks out, backed by the system shock of Sputnik, which did not wear off for a surprisingly long time.

[Anonymous No.10318190]

>>10318116
>A politician starts an ambitious program, but it does not come to fruition during his term
I heard Robert Zubrin talk about this once. If you want to get something big done in space you need to have the whole thing go from planning to launch inside of a decade otherwise it just kicked around forever.

[Anonymous No.10318216]

>>10318190
>>10318116
Well, luckily there are super-rich billionaires nowadays that dont have the issue of limited terms. Sadly, the two billionaires that want to make space happen are both falling for the reusability meme, so I guess we wont have a real space age for another few decades at least.

[Anonymous No.10318248]

>>10318216
Space age is definitely impossible without reusability. SpaceX may or may not fail in their pursuit of reusability, but that does not change the fact that you simply cannot throw away the rocket after one use and expect a space age. If reusability is a meme, then we are never leaving this rock.

[Anonymous No.10318277]

>>10318248
Reusability in rockets is a meme only one shitty US company does it as a gimmick.
The world leaders - NASA and Russia - ignore it completely and even newcomer nations avoid that nonsense because they know how ridiculous it is.

[Anonymous No.10318320]

>>10318277
That shitty US company had the most orbital launches last year, beating even China when you account for mass to orbit. SpaceX is the world leader.

[Anonymous No.10318361]

As long as space activity is limited to exploration it will forever be worthless to the public and politicians.
Space militarization.
Space colonization.
Now those can really get some national backing especially if the competition's already at it (which ultimately was the sputnik scare).

[Anonymous No.10318368]

>>10318248
There are several non-rocket launch alternatives that are way more promising than reusability, especially sky hooks, but also launch loops and so on. Those never got any real attention while reusable rockets are being tried again despite horribly failing with the Space Shuttle programme, and indeed the failure of SpaceX to actually reuse their landed boosters shows that nothing has changed.

I'd love to see NASA putting 50 billion over 10 years into trying to put a skyhook system into Orbit.

[Anonymous No.10318383]

>>10317877
Skylab was pretty good too, until the Shuttle Shuffle killed it before it could get a much needed orbital boost.

>>10317077
>and never using it to grab a soviet satellite.
Since it couldn't go above LEO, it would have to grab a soviet satellite so low that it needed constant reboosts, just like ISS. Hubble was only about 40% higher and it still needed boosts from Shuttle.

>>10318368
>re-usability is a meme
>skyhooks and launch loops aren't

>>10317820
>>10317213
;_;

[Anonymous No.10318387]

>>10318368
You still dont get it: things like sky hooks and launch loops still merely get you into Earth orbit, even if we assume they are not a memes. That is merely the first step, not a destination.

You need routinely reusable spaceships to have a space age, period. No way around that.

[Anonymous No.10318400]

>>10318368
You still need rockets after them, and you need rockets to build them.

Does that ring any warning bells?

[Anonymous No.10318408]

>>10318368
>10 years
>1 SLS flight/y at 1.5 billion
That's below 1000 tons worth of something lifted for about 1/3 your budget. I am not very optimistic about your idea, son.

[Anonymous No.10318409]

>>10318387
The requirements for the spaceships with which you only travel in actual space have very little to do with rockets.

[Anonymous No.10318414]

>>10318408
Those numbers are freshly pulled out of your own ass, huh

[Anonymous No.10318417]

>>10318387
>You need routinely reusable spaceships to have a space age
I don't know why your launch vehicle needs to be the same thing you're on for the longer leg of your trip.
I imagine a ferry that goes from some point in low earth orbit to your destination in the asteroid belt or wherever, it fuels up at both ends of the trip to cut down on weight.

[Anonymous No.10318439]

>>10318409
>The requirements for the spaceships with which you only travel in actual space have very little to do with rockets.

No, they will still be using good old chemical rockets. There is no alternative propulsion technology coming anytime soon. And you still need aerodynamic shape and winglets because using aerobraking whenever possible is most efficient. So it turns out an optimal design for an interplanetary spaceship and a ground-to-orbit booster is remarkably similar. Makes sense to just use the same vehicle for both.

[Anonymous No.10318449]

>>10318414
Lets see how yours smell then.

[Anonymous No.10318450]

>>10318439
No, it absoluetely isn't, even for conventional rockets (see vaccuum engines and sea level engines). That being said, especially for aerobreaking the shape that goes up the atmosphere the most efficient is the most inefficient to properly aerobrake downwards.

But in a world where earth will have functional non-rocket space access, so will any destination we will choose to colonize.

[Anonymous No.10318452]

>>10318450
So much bullshit so little text.

[Anonymous No.10318466]

>>10318450
>But in a world where earth will have functional non-rocket space access, so will any destination we will choose to colonize.

Once again, you cannot colonize anything except for maybe Earth orbit without rocketry. Heck, you cannot even build your non-rocket system around Earth without having cheap reusable rocketry as a prerequisite to be able to lift the huge amount of mass it would require.

It is not an either-or question. Even in a world with a space elevator, reusable rockets are a must for everything else that is not lifting stuff from Earth to orbit.

[Anonymous No.10318468]

>>10318450
>vacuum engines and sea level
Irrelevant. And the difference in performance is far less than the names would imply.
>shape that goes up the atmosphere the most efficient is the most inefficient to properly aerobrake downwards
Outright false. Pointy side going up does not mean the same pointy side will be used when going "down".

There is no functional non-rocket space access.

[Anonymous No.10318479]

>>10318468
>Irrelevant. And the difference in performance is far less than the names would imply.

Yeah, because you can't really optimize an engine that is supposed to do space-only if the same engine will go at least some part in the atmosphere. This goes beyond just a bigger nozzle.

>Outright false. Pointy side going up does not mean the same pointy side will be used when going "down".

No, but an aerodynamic shape will still be hard to aerobrake. You need to break with your belly which means that the rocket will be hard to control and might break. The ideal shape to do reentry look like the landing capsules Astronauts come down into.

>There is no functional non-rocket space access.

Yeah, and thanks to the reusability meme being chased again it won't for at least another few decades.

[Anonymous No.10318482]

>>10318479
>This goes beyond just a bigger nozzle.

Like what? There is no non-rocket space propulsion anywhere close to maturity.

>inb4 VASIMR meme

[Anonymous No.10318490]

>>10318466
>Once again, you cannot colonize anything except for maybe Earth orbit without rocketry. Heck, you cannot even build your non-rocket system around Earth without having cheap reusable rocketry as a prerequisite to be able to lift the huge amount of mass it would require

Boeing actually did an analysis into skyhooks, and putting a first one that can boost small payloads from LEO to GTO could be done in very few launches. However, this technology has no rich protegee, so no steps into developing it are being done.

[Anonymous No.10318495]

>>10318482
He has no idea what he's talking about. Probably another /x/ case or just retarded redditor.

[Anonymous No.10318499]

>>10318490
>putting a first one that can boost small payloads from LEO to GTO

Sounds quite useless. Once again, you cannot colonize space with skyhooks only. You need cheap rockets up there no matter what.

[Anonymous No.10318512]

>>10316922
>Daily reminder that if we could weed out violent retards, establish world peace and live at sustainable population levels, we could've left the solar system already.

[Anonymous No.10318517]

>>10318499
That's not useless, since it would potentially safe you burning up a second stage (building cost usually >10 million) every time you want to send something to GTO. Also, this would be the first step towards eventually being able to send things into outer space by grabing it from an airplane.

[Anonymous No.10318529]

>>10318512
daily reminder that peace leads to stagnation

[Anonymous No.10318533]

>>10318482
Well, I was talking about chemical engines. For example, tri-propellant rocket engines are known to be way more efficient than anything we use, however they are impossible to implement in a rocket due to obvious space/shape restrictions. In outer space though, there is no need why the spaceship has to be aerodynamic (e.g. rocket shaped) so you could actually make tri-propellant engines work.

[Anonymous No.10318558]

>>10318529
I really don't see the correlation between waging war and teledildonics

[Anonymous No.10318572]

>>10317817
>projecting this fucking hard

[Anonymous No.10318595]

Yes, it failed its primary mission - bring down launch costs by rapid reusability.

[Anonymous No.10318603]

>>10318512
That thing would have blinded, deafened and slowly murdered everything for miles around the launch pad.
And what would it do when getting stuck in space after spending it's nuclear bomb fuel?

[Anonymous No.10318607]

>>10318603
>he thinks orion was for getting into orbit
dumbass

[Anonymous No.10318614]

Launch Loop is interesting and doable with current technology. But reusable rockets are not a meme and far more economical than expendable rockets, even if perhaps not as cheap as Launch Loop (but the initial investment is much less, too).

Also its true that pure space ships that never touch an atmosphere dont need to be aerodynamic and can be build in orbit. Reusable rockets make sense only as Earth to LEO cost saving measure, serious space colonization will be accomplished by pure space ships only.

[Anonymous No.10318627]

>>10316922
>Was it a mistake?
Yes.
It made a rocket with a payload of 100 tonnes carry 50+ tonnes of deadweight that was only useful on re-entry and even that cocked up.

The idea of a reusable spacecraft wasn't necessarily bad, but the execution was appalling. If it was a smaller (and lighter) lifting body that had a launch escape system then it could have been successful.

[Anonymous No.10318853]

>>10318607
Orion was proposed as a launch vehicle too, they even did a test flight with conventional explosives

[Anonymous No.10319189]

>>10318368
>non reusable skyhooks
im sold

[Anonymous No.10319265]

>>10318439
>There is no alternative propulsion technology coming anytime soon.
Nuclear thermal rockets would be great

[Anonymous No.10319271]

>>10318479
Can't build non-rocket orbital launch mega-structures unless you have cheap enough access to space to afford it, and you can't use you cheap-access non-rocket options because they don't exist, therefore reusable rocket is necessary, in which case non-rocket options utility evaporates

[Anonymous No.10319275]

>>10318512
>delta V in fps and mph
>thrust expressed as 4e8N
what the fuck

[Anonymous No.10319278]

>>10318627
>50+ tonnes of deadweight
around 75 tonnes actually, not including the OMS propellant or misc supplies

[Anonymous No.10319638]

>>10316922
The shuttle was an ok idea/experiment until the air force started feature creeping the project into a jack of all trades, master of none.

[Anonymous No.10319778]

>>10319638
and then it got feature creeped even harder until it wasn't even a jack of all trades either

[Anonymous No.10319789]

>>10319265
NTR merely doubles the specific impulse over chemical rockets. It is nice but not a qualitative change. If you cannot colonize Mars with chemical, you cannot do it with NTR either.

[Anonymous No.10319877]

>>10319789
I didn't say you can't do it with chemical. However you can't realistically do the outer planets with chemical. Using a 1000 Isp NTR on a vehicle with a normal mass fraction gets you more than 12 km/s of delta V, which is enough to get to Jupiter and propulsively capture and land on Callisto, which means you can get a foothold in the system. That same rocket can get to Saturn on a fast trajectory and use Titan's atmosphere to slow down, aerocapturing into the system. Getting to Uranus will be very difficult since it both requires a fast trajectory and there are no moons with atmospheres (can't use a gas giant atmosphere to capture because the entry velocity will be simply too high). Same problem but worse for Neptune.

Going beyond interplanetary transport, the use of NTR propulsion allows for much easier and faster ISRU propellant production, because you can now simply liquefy CO2/melt water/suck up liquid methane and run it through your engine at efficiency comparable to low to mid efficiency chemical propellants, except you get great utility out of it because the worlds you're doing this on have really low gravity by comparison.

Nuclear thermal is not a technology we need to start colonizing the solar system, but it is a technology that will make it far easier, and would significantly expand our capabilities for both mission range and surface to orbit transport.

[Anonymous No.10319946]

>>10319271
But reusability doesn't make anything cheaper, because it is a meme, and therefore chasing that meme will also not make installation costs cheaper. And a launch loop btw would be ground-based, so no rocket launches needed anyway.

[Anonymous No.10319977]

>>10319946
>Designing and building a launch vehicle for minimal refurbishment is a meme
>A fucking launch loop is not a meme

[Anonymous No.10320002]

>>10318603
>impluse charge yield: 15kT
That's even smaller than Trinity, launching it out in the middle of nowhere would be no problem

[Anonymous No.10320012]

>>10320002
Except you have to fire it off many, many times to get into orbit. This concept is only really viable for in space and even then the amount of fissile material required is pretty ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.10320085]

>>10319877
Not the anon you responded to. I agree NTR has some benefits, mostly in the outer solar system, but it is nuclear. Nuclear is under total government monopoly and control, kept tightly shut under pop-culture psychosis about radiations and bombs. The first guarantees its cost both financial and political will be enough to bankrupt small countries.The second guarantees no politician is going to touch it.
Outer solar system will be limited not by DV but by power generation and that will be leveraged by governments very thoroughly to control the processes.

[Anonymous No.10320273]

>>10319946
go home thunderf00t your drunk

[Anonymous No.10321085]

>>10320085
>I agree NTR has some benefits
/a/ pls go