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I'm the author. It's not spin. It's about preserving and bringing back the early spirit of what made rockets progress so quickly. Yuri Gagarin's launch on Vost
by areoform 4y ago
I'm the author. It's not spin. It's about preserving and bringing back the early spirit of what made rockets progress so quickly.
Yuri Gagarin's launch on Vostok 1 and the launch of Apollo 11 are 8 years 3 months 4 days apart. Or, 3,017 days. For reference, it took 11 years between SLS' announcement and an uncrewed launch. It'll be around twice the time difference between Vostok 1 and Apollo 11 before the SLS delivers humans to the moon.
Humanity progressed so quickly during Project Apollo because they were accepting of "failure" and willing to embrace the associated risk. Post-Apollo and post-Challenger, this willingness and risk appetite completely disappeared leading to paralysis.
When we call something as awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) as yesterday's test a "failure," we are implicitly rejecting the Apollo paradigm and embracing the SLS one. I think it's harmful for humanity, in the long run, to do so.
We should build and launch more rockets. Some of them will explode. Such is life.
- Haga 4y ago[dead]
- kragen 4y ago[flagged]
- hikawaii 4y agoAbsolutely bless. People are mad about whatever dumb thing Elon did with Twitter this week. Even when applied to Twitter, the question presents itself: Are you really happy with what it was before? The only path from "then" to "better" is through "doing lots of stuff, some of it stupid".
- robotresearcher 4y agoApollo cost a nontrivial fraction of GDP. It was risky indeed, but we shouldn’t forget that the project had spectacular resources available, far more than SLS. IIRC Apollo cost around a quarter trillion dollars in today’s money.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DennisP 4y agoOn the other hand, Starship is costing less to develop than SLS, but with a bigger rocket, groundbreaking* new engines and full reusability while SLS is a disposable with warmed-over Shuttle technology. * (Admittedly a little too groundbreaking.)
- guenthert 4y agoThat wasn't some college guys blowing up a lab, this was a pretty costly failure. Surely the reliability of the engines could have been tested without the spaceship part of the stack. Someone took shortcuts and paid for it.
- the_mungler 4y agoNot really. How would you test a rocket engine at low atmospheric pressure? You can't exactly stick a rocket engine in a vacuum chamber and light it. Then once you're launching something into space, you may as well have a first stage to go along with it. Are you saying they should have launched the booster stage by itself? Why? What would they learn from that? Would you ever expect them to launch a booster on it's own in practice?