Awesome song about this that becomes increasingly more relevant every day:
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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First flight of an airplane: 1903 First landing on the Moon: 1969
67 years. Not even a single average lifetime.
I remember there being a newspaper interview with an old lady. She was a child and saw one of the wright brothers first flights. She then got to see man land on the moon, at the other end of her life.
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“I can see so many sick and impoverished children from up here!”
—Jeff Bezos, probably
They should have opened the door on his space travel
As though he cares to look.
They were obstructing the view.
Look at the earliest airplanes. Little things made out of cotton and balsa that couldn't outrace a strong horse.
Look at the earliest video games.
edit = I'm not a Bezos fanboy, but if we're going to have space travel there are going to be stunts, just like there were back in barnstormer days.
Space travel is not the same.
Strictly considering low earth orbit, one needs to accelerate a payload to 25,000 km/h and like 500km above the ground. This is not computation or atmospheric flight. There's no shortcut, no engineering to work out, the physics dictates this is a hard problem. Solutions:
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You go up with a chemical rocket, where almost all the launch mass is fuel. To get the ratio in your head, think the liquid in a coke can vs the can that holds it... that's the mass/fuel ratio we're dealing with, and tricks like hybrid engines or booster returns barely soften the MASSIVE cost for even the tiniest things you send up.
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You assist it from the ground. "Gun" launches, as some are developing (and that I'm quite enthusiastic about), can't launch humans. Stratolaunches (from planes) only get you partway there, more like a booster.
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You go nuclear. This is the only way to increase energy density vs. chemical rockets enough to make a difference. Needless to say, there are significant environmental/safety concerns when doing this on the ground, and I'm as pro-nuclear as anyone you'll find. Check out Atomic Rockets for more on this, with concrete theoretical designs that are still batshit crazy: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php
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You develop a space elevator or some analogue. No commercial launch research is even pretending to develop this, and it would require massive materials science breakthroughs.
...That's it. That's how you get to space. This isn't a "Wright Brothers vs modern jets" thing, that kind of cost optimization is just not physically possible. And whenever Musk lies through his teeth about practically colonizing Mars, people need to understand that...
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Planes have a fucking destination and are designed to move volumes of people from A to B, and still can't compete with rail over 1000km distances (see: France).
Video games were designed to be replayable and accessible to the masses, running on the common hardware at the time.
You want to build a train from Japan to San Francisco? Bring back ocean liners like the Titanic?
I said 1000km - that's short to mid-haul
The Wright brothers didn't have a fucking destination they were just trying to fly.
They were trying to invent a device of practical utility that could carry passengers and payloads, not to empower the eccentric elite
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