RE: NASA is launching humans again
May 24, 2020 at 6:19 pm
(This post was last modified: May 24, 2020 at 6:28 pm by Succubus#2.)
(May 24, 2020 at 5:08 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:(May 24, 2020 at 2:01 pm)Succubus#2 Wrote: Is this nonsense still doing the rounds?
If we were to build something of that size today it's unlikely in the extreme we would use 1960 technology.
Actually, we can not do that much better than 1960s technology. This why many of the most successful carrier rockets in service today were designed during the 1960s. Modern rockets can do a little better. But all development cost of new rocket must still be paid for. 1960s rockets are not quite as good, but all bugs have been worked out and all development costs amortized. When you take these into account, 1960s rockets are still Quite competitive.
The only place where modern rockets really became competitive is with a range of payload and orbit performance that wasn’t in demand during thr 1960s, but had become very lucrative with large communities and earth observation satellites.
Agreed.
It's hard to see how the design of combustion chambers and turbo pumps can be improved on, I think the big advantage with modern rockets would be the construction materials used for the load bearing members.
But anyway, I've found an old blueprint:

![[Image: up_goer_five.png]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/up_goer_five.png)
Enjoy.
Miserable Bastard.