So, if you research the history of space exploration, you’ll find one result keeps happening over and over and over and over.

They keep exploding.

It’s not surprising. Their basic foundation is that they are rockets. Even from their original designs, rockets have always been built with the purpose of exploding. They’re weapons. But, before they were weapons, the ORIGINAL idea, was to use the propulsion to exit Earths atmosphere and into space. The only problem is that when this was being designed, I forget the guys name, but he was a scientist that the nazis had captured. He designed the rockets for space craft. Hitler then took the designs and thought “Let’s blow up London!”

So, once the war was over, the United States came over, and recruited him into NASA. His designs were how NASA got started. Modified versions of his original designs are what Apollo 11 used to get to the moon. So, the design CAN work. However, there were 10 Apollo missions before that didn’t reach the moon. The first one ended disastrously.

The Challenger shuttle ended in disaster.

Even though they aren’t NASA, recently in the past month Elon Musk’s SpaceX had an explosion. Jeff Bezos also had a rocket explode. So this is still an issue.

And I always wondered, what would happen if you just took a commercial jet, and flew above the clouds? Well, they DO fly above the clouds. So what would happen if you just kept going “up”?

And I’m sure you can’t just grab a stock Delta Airlines 747 and fly into orbit, but why not design a space craft, which more resembles the take-off of an airplane? Drives forward really fast, and then lifts? Except it’s not flying NYC to LA. It just keeps lifting and lifting, until it’s in orbit.

You could put thrusters on it to go forward in space. And then for landings, you wouldn’t drop off into the ocean. You’d just land at an airport. The crazy thing is, the people of NASA are so talented, that they could route the whole thing, in a way that they land at whichever airport they want. So they’d know ahead of time NOT to schedule any landings or takeoffs for this 3 hour period of time when the space craft lands.

And I bet with enough time, they could get the experience to reduce that 3 hours, into 15 minutes. Knowing exactly when they’ll arrive. Also no more of this breakaway pods that fall back to earth after detatching, or the other ones which just float out in space forever.

But I’m sure I can’t be the only one with this idea, so I figure the most likely is that it’s a scientific restriction. Where they can’t do it, because…and this is where the explanation would be.

Anyone know the explanation?

  • tiptoes@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    You’re 12 right?

    It’s mainly of “you need to go a lot faster than an airplane does”, which means the engines needed to go that fast need different fuel, and when you go high enough you don’t have enough air to burn the fuel with so you have to bring your own, which means your spaceship now gets bigger and heavier……which means bigger engines and more fuel and oxidizer.

    And then the lift part……air provides the lift, but there’s less air the higher you go, until you hit the point where you both don’t have enough air to hold you up AND you don’t have enough air to feed your engines.

    So with that combination, with current technology, it’s only feasible to go up as fast as you can to get out of the atmosphere, then go sideways as fast as possible to get to orbital speed. Hence the current launch paths.