We gotta figure out a better way than strapping ourselves to a continuously exploding bomb and pulling some serious Gs for 8 minutes.
Wonder how some of those SSTO space plane projects are doing…there was a British one I can’t remember. Used hybrid air-breathing scramjets, switching to internal oxidizer once it was going fast and high enough.
Space planes carry along heavy-as-fuck wings, control surfaces and a lot of other bullshit that’s only useful inside the atmosphere, and which massively increase fuel consumption for every single maneuver while your space plane is actually where you want it to do stuff - in space. And the only benefit is that the atmosphere helps lift and fuel your vehicle to about 10% of orbital velocity. The other 90% it will have to accelerate just like any other rocket.
The SpaceX approach is much better: Land and reuse all parts of your rocket, but don’t carry them with you further than where they’re useful. Rockets leave the atmosphere where wings would work within a few minutes anyway.
Put your money where your mouth is and open source the Tesla software. Do it. I fuckin’ dare ya.
Edit: we want Falcon 9’s landing guidance software too.
Open sourcing the falcon 9 software would almost definitely be a violation of ITAR… On second thought it would be fun to see him go to prison.
Nothing could possibly go wrong open sourcing a
misslerocket guidance system…Source code is protected under 1st amendment
That’s like saying state secrets are protected under the 1st lol
I don’t think it’s true
No, not just open, free it entirely. License the code under a GPL license.
I want a world where anyone can go to space. It the thing I wanna do the most. But I’m not rich and I’m no super smart and I have awful health.
I know what you mean, but if it’s any consolation, you are in space.
We gotta figure out a better way than strapping ourselves to a continuously exploding bomb and pulling some serious Gs for 8 minutes.
Wonder how some of those SSTO space plane projects are doing…there was a British one I can’t remember. Used hybrid air-breathing scramjets, switching to internal oxidizer once it was going fast and high enough.
Edit: here it is and I was mistaken it’s not a SCRAMjet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)
Space planes carry along heavy-as-fuck wings, control surfaces and a lot of other bullshit that’s only useful inside the atmosphere, and which massively increase fuel consumption for every single maneuver while your space plane is actually where you want it to do stuff - in space. And the only benefit is that the atmosphere helps lift and fuel your vehicle to about 10% of orbital velocity. The other 90% it will have to accelerate just like any other rocket.
The SpaceX approach is much better: Land and reuse all parts of your rocket, but don’t carry them with you further than where they’re useful. Rockets leave the atmosphere where wings would work within a few minutes anyway.