spacex continuing to blow their new rocket design up is incredibly terrifying because it’s the one they're trying to build to send people to mars. it’s built on a billionaire’s understanding of rocket science with actual engineers trying to do what they can to reach what he wants while having their jobs on the line. it’s just a recipe for disaster especially when it’s built by and for a company that operates with profit motive.
there’s been so many other theoretical approaches to manned interplanetary travel yet the only one we’re going to see any time soon is probably going to be the emerald mining divorced dad’s “why fix what’s not broken just make it bigger duh” rocket because none of the other attempts can pull together the sort of funding to make it happen under this organization of the economy.
like i think the whole idea that musk has is that you climb into the rocket on earth and climb out of the same rocket on mars all in one single launch. which is kinda bad because with all the extra stuff you’re taking for manned interplanetary travel you’re really starting to directly fight the tyranny of the rocket equation. all to keep his individualist little pod ideas intact when a larger more elaborate system would work better.
for those unaware, the tsiolkovsky rocket equation is a relatively simple equation that describes a rocket’s potential change in velocity (ΔV) and its relationship to the mass and propellant. the tyranny of the rocket equation is this idea that as you increase the payload/mass of the rocket the amount of propellant required to create the same amount of ΔV increases exponentially. a good rule of thumb is that ~70% of a rocket’s mass is fuel that is consumed purely on the ascent from earth out of the atmosphere into orbit. the other 30% is what you have left to work with for payload and upper stages.
so a potential solution to this problem is to make some kind of interplanetary vessel that stays in orbit and doesn’t have to waste fuel bringing things back and forth from earth that don’t absolutely need to go. we’ve proven with multiple space stations that we are capable of constructing stuff in orbit, this would basically just have to be engineered as a movable space station (which is theoretically doable and nasa has considered multiple times but hasn’t had the funding / government support). this way you could use smaller and more reliable rockets to ferry payloads of fuel/supplies/passengers to the interplanetary vessel leaving all of the stuff that has no reason to come back down to earth back up in orbit saving a lot of fuel in the long run. like it’s a six month journey at its absolute shortest you’re going to need medical equipment, quarters, kitchens, entertainment and etc for human life why would you want to have to lift that stuff from the ground every single time you launch?
it just feels like another instance of tech bro futurist hype sticking with what they consider cool instead of what’s an actually good solution to the problem.