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I’ve said for a while that we won’t be ready for the real space age until you can have a rusty pickup in space. What I mean by that is that we have it down wel

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• ryandvm 2y ago
  You have to be careful how much wisdom you glean from fiction. The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    That's more an argument for redundant doors than perfect doors, though.
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    The oceans are very hostile to humans too, really not much less than space, and a lot of ocean-going vessels are rusty hulks.
    • panick21_ 2y ago
      A lot of ocean going vessels were literally made from wood that was continuously rotting.
    • flerchin 2y ago
      A naked human can survive the ocean for 3 orders of magnitude longer than they can survive space.
      • inglor_cz 2y ago
        Calm ocean, yes. The real problem are the storms, as a naked human you won't survive in an ocean storm any longer than in vacuum. At least you are going to space in a sophisticated vessel full of redundant life support systems. People sailed the high seas in old, barely seaworthy wooden ships dangerously overloaded with cargo, which didn't even have a reliable way of determining where precisely they were, because no one could tell longitude at sea before the mid-1700s or so.
        • foota 2y ago
          Didn't they die by the droves?
          • inglor_cz 2y ago
            In fact, they did. Being a sailor was about the most dangerous profession that you could choose, including the military. Until today, some jobs at sea are pretty dangerous. Being a fisherman in Alaskan waters is much more risky than being an (American, not Russian) soldier. People still do it. Which convinces me that people will risk their lives going to Mars, and more than a few of them. Some people are just built that way.
            • tsimionescu 2y ago
              People risk their lives for high-risk, high-reward jobs. They don't risk their lives for high-risk, no-Reward explorations.
              • inglor_cz 2y ago
                Do you believe that no one feels highly rewarded by exploring wilderness? Generations of explorers, many of whom lost their lives for no gain, indicate otherwise. Let us make a thought experiment. Let's say that Musk, tomorrow, declares "we are now creating a list of future Mars colonists, reasonably healthy individuals under 70 can apply from anywhere in the world, please send us your resumes". Would they get fewer than 10 million applicants? I'd rather guess 50 million or so. Of course, some of those are going to get cold feet the moment they receive their one-way flight ticket in mail, but quite a few won't. By your hypothesis, there would be approximately zero applicants. I don't believe that.
  • api 2y ago
    I think the definition of workable old ship is going to be different in space, but ultimately you can expand workable envelope for it by over-engineering critical parts. That's kind of what I mean. Right now we don't quite know how to do that efficiently or effectively. Still remember that at one time moving faster than 15mph was considered insane and pushed the limits of materials and vehicle design. Same for high altitude flight, McMurdo station, deep ocean diving, etc. In a lot of ways very deep ocean diving is harder than space. The pressure differentials are a lot worse. The hard part about space is really launch and delta-V budgets.
  • solarkraft 2y ago
    No, that's the point: It's a significant technological advancement for some unreliability/imprecision to not mean critical failure.
    • andrewflnr 2y ago
      So how can that work for air seals? Have a big robust air storage that can replenish losses from your half-broken door? How many other systems like that do we need? And all that extra weight somehow doesn't get you stranded in space when your badly maintained, low efficiency engine can't move it and your payload with the fuel that fits in the tanks? I get the principle, it just seems literally impossible to achieve (without, maybe, a radical step forward from chemical propulsion).
      • ceejayoz 2y ago
        Same way rusty old cargo ships keep the sea out. Redundancy. Compartments. Emergency doors that close. Crew that run around patching leaks. Spare parts and welding equipment. The ISS leaks air on a daily basis.
  • somenameforme 2y ago
    Everything's relative. People a century ago would probably have felt uncomfortable at the idea of DIYing a multi ton vehicle being accelerated by a extremely high power pistons pounding up and down thanks to creating a controlled explosion inside a tight little box, that you can then hop in and cruise around at 80MPH+. And indeed if something goes critically wrong, you're dead. We just work to reduce the number of ways that things can go critically wrong.
    • hot_gril 2y ago
      I think a century or longer ago, they wouldn't care. It was already pretty easy to fall off a horse and die.
      • willyt 2y ago
        I can't find the details now bit in the early 19th century an MP introduced a bill to parliament to make it illegal for trains to go over 30mph because in his opinion it would be impossible to breath at that speed.
  • 7952 2y ago
    Although space flight tends to have long periods of time where the craft can just coast. You have time to work the problem. A complete system failure could be worse on a plane in cloud than a spacecraft in orbit.
  • dotnet00 2y ago
    That's more of a movie trope. The ISS has had leaks, they are not explosive decompression. It makes sense too, the pressure vessel only has to hold in 1 atm, and we can manage to breathe a lot less than that.
• Zigurd 2y ago
  That doesn't work IRL. Space is insanely unforgiving. While Starship has a vastly better chance than STS had of achieving rapid reusability, you really can't launch with a rocket that isn't up to spec because adding robustness adds weight. Unlike a multi-stage expendable rocket, Starship uses all its fuel to get to orbit. To go to the moon or beyond, it requires refueling by several other Starships that also just get to orbit. If the payload spec can't be met you need even more refueling launches. If reusability isn't rapid, you need a starship for each refueling launch. If cost goals are not met, the cost difference vs expendable rockets shrinks. Everything has to go right.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    There's a difference between getting to space and being in space. A true space age will involve many ships that never enter atmosphere or land.
    • foota 2y ago
      Won't you still need to enter and exit gravity wells? I guess you never lose the energy from launch though if you stay moving, so maybe it's easier?
      • NortySpock 2y ago
        If you don't go very deep into the gravity well (said another way: high orbit of whatever planet you want to orbit) then the fuel cost is reduced compared to going down close to the surface.
    • imtringued 2y ago
      Lockheed Martin is building the cislunar transporter to travel between the moon and earth.
  • aeternum 2y ago
    The vast majority of the weight however is oxidizer which you could theoretically eliminate since the rocket is surrounded with various amounts of oxygen depending on launch trajectory. A scramjet power first stage for example could overcome the tyranny of the rocket equation (at least on earth).
• echoangle 2y ago
  I would compare it to Airplanes, and there are not a lot of rust-bucket airplanes, because just like in space, failures can lead to unavoidable death very quickly. That’s not comparable to a reliable pickup
  • ggreer 2y ago
    It really depends on where you are in the world. Poorer countries often have older aircraft that are in worse states of repair. Most aren't exactly rust buckets, but they wouldn't be legally airworthy in places like the US or EU. This does result in worse safety records, but it's still safer than driving the same distance in most places.
  • erkt 2y ago
    Lots of private planes from the 70’s still being flown, there’s a little cosmetic rust..
    • echoangle 2y ago
      Those are getting overhauls in regular intervals though, it’s more like theseus airplane. Except for the structure itself, there is a lot of repair and replacement happening. And they also have a less-than-great safety record (although that is also pilot related).
• hot_gril 2y ago
  We also won't be ready for the sci-fi-style space age in real life unless there's a use case for it. Imagine Star Wars except there's no life on any reachable planets, what would they even do with their spaceships? And Star Trek doesn't have "good old rust-bucket" ships in it, but the whole premise of it is that they found a way to move faster than the speed of light.
  • RecycledEle 2y ago
    > a use case for it Here are a few likely use cases: * in-space science * in-space R&D * in-space industry * mining small rocks (asteroids) in space * space-based power * military applications Long-term, we may see terraforming planets and minor planets.
• grishka 2y ago
  This is unlikely. We don't really do this on airplanes, where servicing procedures and airworthiness criteria are very strict, and space is orders of magnitude more unforgiving than flying in the atmosphere at ~10km altitude. If there's cabin decompression on a plane, you get an oxygen mask and land safely in the nearest airport. If there's cabin decompression on a spacecraft, you're dead. If there's a problem with engines on a plane, you can still glide and land somewhere. If there's a problem with engines on a rocket, guess what, you're dead.
  • radu_floricica 2y ago
    I'm working on my PPL at the moment, and I found some pretty fascinating facts about certifications. Apparently there's a very very sharp divide between anything that can be constructed as "commercial" flight, aka somebody pays you to take them for a flight, and non-commercial, i.e. it's just you and maybe your friends. The former category has some pretty solid regulations like, for example, a continuous chain of service history. Once you decide a plane is no longer commercial, you can skip that, and it suddenly becomes less regulated than even your average car. There are rust buckets flying out there without any issue. There's a guy on tiktok that bought a literal $200 plane and is documenting his work on it - and he started test flying it almost immediately. I don't have enough experience in the field to tell myself if aviation tech is mature enough to be considered "rusty truck level", but we definitely have the data to know it.
  • kaliqt 2y ago
    Actually we do this on airplanes globally. There's many older aircraft or poorly maintained aircraft, as long as vital requirements don't fail, it's fine. Yes it's different from a car's requirements, no the concept is not different, rusty pickup just means different things.