12 ms·
It's mad how rocket landings are now more exciting than rocket launches.
by gadders 2y ago
It's mad how rocket landings are now more exciting than rocket launches.
- cjk2 2y agoThey used to be far more exciting. It's the anticipation of less excitement that is nail biting :D
- tim333 2y agoIt's one of the fun things with SpaceX that with many flights you don't quite know what's going to blow up or go wrong. The commercial flights are reliable but the experimental ones are interesting.
- steve1977 2y agoWhen I was young, there were no rocket landings.
- GJim 2y agoMy grandfather recalls (what he later found out to be) a rocket landing in London's east end during his youth. There were quite a lot of them at the time.
- jonah 2y ago"RSD"? (Rapid Scheduled Disassembly)
- SoftTalker 2y agoGerman V1 or V2, presumably.
- tialaramex 2y agoOnly the V2 is a rocket, the V1 is a flying bomb. They're both terror weapons, as actual products they have no direct military value, they exist solely in order to scare the shit out of enemy civilians, but liquid fuelled rockets are an invention with a whole lot of interesting practical applications - the V1 is just a bad idea (unless you have unlimited resources, which the Germans did not, and your goal is to terrify enemy civilians, which is not a legitimate military strategy).
- EasyMark 2y agoV1: didn't they have to start somewhere?
- ElevenLathe 2y agoV2 was of questionable legitimate military utility too. Sure you can hit a target the size of a city, but unlike carpet bombing, the payload isn't enough to guarantee that something specific is destroyed. So you can only use it to randomly harm civilians and maybe every once in a while hit a military target. Compare this with the Western Allies' approach where they also killed and maimed tons of civilians but at least stood some chance of also destroying the building-sized thing they were aiming at, given the stupefying tonnage of bombs involved. "Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? 'That's not my department,' says Werner Von Braun." -- Tom Lehrer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoFirebombing whole cities in Europe and Japan is still a black mark in US history. It’s really hard for me to get “holier than thou” on other terror campaigns when I remember that.
- stctw 2y agoIt's easy to say that now. Have you lived through unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. How many of your country's people should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started by the enemy? Should you not use the means that will preserve as many of your lives as you can? This century has yet to see anything like WW1 and WW2, and those who are alive today are incredibly disconnected from our recent past.
- steve1977 2y agoI actually thought about including a “non-destructive” qualifier… ;)
- mannykannot 2y ago"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun. - Tom Lehrer. https://genius.com/Tom-lehrer-wernher-von-braun-lyrics https://genius.com/Tom-lehrer-wernher-von-braun-lyrics
- unethical_ban 2y agoIn German, or Englisch, I know how to count down... und I'm learning Chinese, says Werner von Braun. Written in 1961. Wild.
- chgs 2y agoThe rocket performed perfectly. It just landed on the wrong planet.
- panick21_ 2y agoMaybe if it was his department they would have hit London more often.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gadders 2y agoNor for me, but I'm old enough to have seen re-runs of things like Flash Gordon in black and white which I'm sure had rockets landing vertically. (This could be the Mandela effect though).
- shiroiushi 2y agoIt's not a false memory. Lots of old sci-fi in that time had vertically-landing rockets. Even old Looney Toones episodes IIRC, as well as Twilight Zone, and much more. It's nothing special; it's a logical consequence of the question "how would you land a rocket" when you assume the rocket is single-stage and can just travel from world to world, and you're a fiction writer who doesn't understand (or purposely neglects) the rocket equation. I mean, how else would you land a rocket, so it can be blasted off again? (Again, remember this is sci-fi that's very light on the "sci" part, where they're thinking in the future that humans will have self-contained rocket ships that can just travel from world to world without worrying about supporting infrastructure, the rocket equation, having enough fuel, needing to do any maintenance, etc.)
- adolph 2y ago> When I was young, there were no rocket landings. For all born after July 1969, you lived with rocket landings: Apollo lunar lander was a propulsive soft landing.
- pixl97 2y agoI mean the old rocket landings threw away 90%+ of the rocket first. Minus the hot staging ring and some molten metal almost all of this rocket was present at both its landings.
- cubefox 2y agoI wonder how much earlier a rocket like Falcon 9 (with automatic landing of the lower stage) could realistically have been developed and built. In the 70s? 80s? 90s?
- adolph 2y agoI think even into the 90s it would be difficult from a compute and sensor perspective.
- czl 2y agoRocket landing on the moon does not count? Luna 9 in 1966 was the first spacecraft to achieve a controlled soft landing on the Moon.
- fooker 2y ago70s no. 80s maybe, depends on clever use of computing. 90s yes.
- adolph 2y agoThe flying bedstead of 1964 was a reusable rocket that propulsively la ded and was reused. It didn’t go very high tho. . . https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/flying-bedstead/ https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/flying-bedstead/
- 2y ago
- dingaling 2y agoIf you were young between 1993 and 1995 then DC-X was making landings
- rqtwteye 2y agoThe first Space Shuttle landings were pretty cool though.
- rbanffy 2y agoBut they weren't rockets.
- BurningFrog 2y agoSame thing with airplanes. The landing is much more important than the takeoff.
- function_seven 2y agoReal quote from my grandmother, years ago: "I'm not scared of flying so much. I just wish the plane didn't have to get so close to the ground before landing!"