I've talked about this a few times before but – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726133 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47726078 - to repeat myself;
It's because we're a very primitive species, and the forces involved here are genuinely new. It's physically not possible at our current level of technology to make this "safer" due to the distances and energies involved.
I will let John Young explain it his way;
> ‘You put some people on top of four million pounds of high explosives, you light the fuse, and in eight and a half minutes they are going eight times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?’
He test flew the shuttle. They put an ejection seat in the shuttle – which was obviously insane. And a reporter asks him about ejecting while the solid rocket motors were burning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLU4CK7UHd4
(I'm deeply saddened that I will never get to meet the man and ask him the secret to his magical heart rate.)
and the forces involved here are genuinely new
I remember growing up with things proudly advertised as "space-age technology"... which largely meant the 1950s and 1960s, and of course it's what got us to the moon, multiple times. Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison.
> Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison
We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs, 20x increase in launches/year, significantly increased reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason), and reliable vertical landings with reusable lower stages.
The current crop of rockets may not be as visually impressive as a Saturn 5, but they are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity rather than a risky experiment
> and reliable vertical landings
We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago [1]
> reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason)
Static fire tests are routine since the 60s, nothing new here either [2].
> We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs
This is about manufacturing optimization and it has very little to do with rocket safety.
> hey are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity
They are not. It is at best marketing speech. The access to space is at best cheaper but will never be commodity.
The parent post is right on point: Rockets todays are still fundamentally the same giant bomb filled at 85% with explosive that we were making in the 60s. And this is unlikely to change and unlikely to ever be safe.
There is very valid reasons to that: we still did not find anything better than chemical propulsion to go in the last 80 years. It is the only 'working' solution in term of the energy density required to bring us there:
- Ion thrusters have amazing Isp but nowhere the Thrust/Weight ratio required to launch from Earth.
- Nuclear propulsion is good on paper but controversial in practice for pretty obvious reasons.
So we are still stuck. Stuck with burning 1'000t of highly inflammable Ergols in few minutes to just push any blob in orbit. With very thin engineering margins, way thiner than in airplane manufacturing or currently pretty any other domain.
And that make it unlikely to ever be really "safe" and accessible to the mass.
At least, not before we find a better solution to the problem.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBar3FyI_cA
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rP6k18DVdg
>> and reliable vertical landings
> We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago
One could argue the applicability of "reliable" given the project's track record, but it's not really relevant in any case since that program only got up a few kilometers and nowhere near orbital velocity.
Falcon 9 is as reliable and safe as an airliner flight - what more do you want?
Still, you ideally just want to launch people and some complex machinery from Earth & produce about everything for in space use from local resources. That makes it possible to heavily optimize Earth to LEO craft for safety and reliability, alleviating most of these concerns.
If I had a few hundred billion lying around, I'd be spending a couple of billion a year on grants for new physics research.
Hire all those smart people who waste their lives being quants and steer them in the direction of something useful.
This is fair but I'm not sure the low hanging fruit is going to be developing technology that can reach earth escape velocity without being extremely sensitive to how well built and prepared the system applying the enormous amount force required is. Even the hypothetical stuff like Spin Launch and space elevators is going to have catastrophic failure modes....
> If I had a few hundred billion lying around, I'd be spending a couple of billion a year on grants for new physics research.
Unfortunately, this is not the way the world is going right now.
Physics research, and generally speaking fundamental research, is publicly funded.
Meaning, most of the time, under funded.
Arguably the first Starship launch for example (the one with concrete rain) was pretty impressive, at least on this end of the webcast! :)
Personally, I'm impressed with just how unimpressed I am. Or rather, rocket launches feel like they really are becoming more and more commoditized. To the point that routine trips to the moon doesn't feel like a crazy future.
Our species is pretty young, around ~2 million years old, give or take a few million / hundred thousand years depending on whom you're talking to.
We've had this technology for ~70 years. That's 0.0035% of our species lifetime. That's pretty new.
We're used to thinking of things in human time scales, but it took us how long to master fire? And then smelt metals? And then learn mathematics...? These things take time for a species to master.
The contrast in my opinion comes more from the fact that 50 years prior to the space age people rode horses as a standard mean of transportation (more or less). It’s underwhelming to not see the line going from horse to rocket continue on the same path 50 years later.
We went to the moon in the late 60s as a massively expensive cold-war propaganda campaign, after the Soviet Union humiliating America for years when it came to firsts in space. It was a question of honor and showing that capitalism is better than communism.
Then it took roughly 50 years of progress to make space flight cheap enough that the economics make sense. With a couple setbacks a long the way that might have cost us a decade or two
"very primitive" - primitive in relation to who? As a species we control the planet, we rule every other species currently known to humans, how is that primitive?
We might well be the most advanced species in the universe. Seems unlikely, but we really don’t have anything else to measure against at the moment.
why did you preface this with how many times you've made your point to deaf ears in the past? Am I supposed to follow your opinions across the site?
It used to be a thing that people did when repeating a comment. I've used HN for a very long time.
It's a form of manners from those days so that people know that I'm not just spamming something. I think a lot of the people who used to write like that are gone. Most metaphorically, some physically. I'm trying to keep the tradition alive.
Did you know that we are a primitive species though? (up to anyone to guess what that means)
It means we like digital watches.