281–287 of 287 posts
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According to wikipedia, there were 135 shuttle missions. So, a 1.481% failure rate in case anyone was wondering.
From a commercial, ROI standpoint, having %40 of your hardware eventually destroy itself is bad news. Especially since each time your whole enterprise stops for years until you find out what went wrong and fix it.
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I think you underestimate how quickly Mars could become an industrial powerhouse. It won't be starting at a Mayflower level of technology.
Why would it? It has less usable resources than loads of places on Earth that aren't used at all. Maybe if Mars is some sort of lawless territory it can become the libertarian haven some rich people want, and could trick some future slaves to get sent over there....
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The Shuttle just made the mistake to not be a fully two stage system, it was a strange hybrid. SpaceX also figured out that vertical landing had many advantages compared to a plane.
The Soviet Buran shuttle had the right idea. It didn't have main engines and was launched with the Energia rocket, which could be used independently with other cargo as well. Also, it was capable of fully automated landing, unlike the American Shuttle
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> 5. Fully automated flight; perhaps no pilot. Almost certainly no pilot.
I agree; I can, however, imagine some kind of on-flight technician. Maybe.
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That is the issue you get when you do not spend money on science though. Compare the NASA budget to the US military budget. What if you would reverse that? Don't you think we would be better off in every way possible?
Of course. What about all the other things I mentioned as well? There are so many more--what about for profit prisons? As technology increases our suicide rate isn't really consistently declining. Our prison population has increased. Technology cant make those improvements alone. We need improvements in governance, culture and education for this to happen. Technology can be used for good or bad. By itself, it is just…
Take a black marker, open your local newspaper page and mark any not reasonable accident as suicide (if you dont believe me join a fire-brigade and find out for yourself).
You have a little chess-board in the news every morning.
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From a commercial, ROI standpoint, having %40 of your hardware eventually destroy itself is bad news. Especially since each time your whole enterprise stops for years until you find out what went wrong and fix it.
What?! All hardware failes eventually. If you get an average of 27 of flights from a single rocket, I'd say that's outstandingly good news!
False. It's not outstandingly good news, not if we want to become multi-planetary in short order. We need to get to better than commercial airliner standards quickly.
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International waters start more than 20km out from the coastline (12 nm)[1], that would be a very long ferry just to reach the spaceport, not just a short hop like shown in the video... [1] https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...
That's about half an hour at a not that fast 25 knots. 30 minutes from a city center. For any coastal city, that is likely to be no worse as the time to get to an intercontinental airport. Still means about 2h00 from NYC to Shangai, door to door. Quite an improvement over the 17hours today. Non coastal cities have a problem... In any case it takes care of most nimby as it's to far away for the neighbors to care. So r…
yes you are right, I wasn't factoring in the fact that currently airline travel requires you to travel to an airport which is usually very far from the city centre.