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Wright Brothers first airplane flew only 100m or so.
by 1024core 2y ago
Wright Brothers first airplane flew only 100m or so.
- nvy 2y agoThe "Wright Brothers" moment for rocketry happened 60 years ago.
- gridspy 2y agoThe first useful rockets were during the second world war, used for artillery into London. So over 80 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket
- hermitcrab 2y agoDepends what you mean by 'useful'. They were a technological marvel, but an incredibly inefficient way to deliver approx a ton of high explosive. But I guess we should be thankful that Hitler wasted so much of Germany's increasingly scarce resources on 'Wunderwaffe' like rockets. The Allies developed technology that was less showy, but much more useful (computers, cavity magnetron, proximity fuze, atom bomb etc).
- nvy 2y agoYeah I was referring to Sputnik, as the V2 wasn't orbital.
- BHSPitMonkey 2y agoEvery new team has to start somewhere; even SpaceX had to learn to crawl before they could walk, and that was with the benefit of decades of prior art to draw upon. It would be a shame if SpaceX became the last company to ever succeed at designing a rocket because no one after them would try.
- dexwiz 2y ago80 years depending on your marker.