@JaredBusch said in Non-IT News Thread:
Falcon Heavy
Which only goes into low Earth orbit, my point is the ideas of going to the Moon or Mars with single stage are pretty much out of the question.
From what I have read, he is basically an ass. But, he is right to disrupt. Even if all of his endeavors do not work out over all, he has succeeded in bringing a new open mindset to a few industries that were honestly stagnating.
I'm not saying disrupting things is bad, but it is used as a term so vague and often ridiculous now that it's lost all meaning. Much of the time "disrupt" means to do something that's already been done, but put a fancy web front end on it or make it an iPhone app. Additionally, people often get so overly confident that they waste billions and billions of dollars trying to disrupt something literally impossible (uBeam is another great example), but when it comes to space travel with rocket fuel, 99% of all those problems were solved 60 years ago, they just want to ignore what's been done and start all over.
It's not disruption to start over and pretend you're a revolutionary or learning something new when I could have told you the Soviets or the Americans ran into the same problems and solved them even before colour TV was common. The single stage rocket for beyond-Earth orbit is a great example of this. They could say tons of money just by reading about what's already been done and take it seriously. The attitude with a lot of private space travel firms is that this cannot be done or the work done before is a joke and meaningless, and not even worth looking at.
If he really wants to disrupt, he needs to push for nuclear rocket engines. They work, they were built 50 years ago, but they aren't even seen as an option by anyone anymore because of "oh no, nuclear rockets in space, that's terrible, it's not like space itself is full of radiation." They go a hell of a lot faster than chemical rockets and last a lot longer, but rarely ever do I see people from NASA/ESA/Russia promote them as a viable option when they absolutely do exist, that's the crazy part, I'm not even talking about something theoretical, I'm talking about something the size of a refrigerator putting out the same energy as a hydroelectric dam. I'm talking the Moon in a day and Mars in a month, not a week and eight months instead.
Seriously, no really, this technology exists outside YouTube conspiracy videos, in fact I'm not sure any of them even know about it since it's actual science.
We could get to the Moon or Mars a lot faster, cheaper, and more efficiently, but nuclear energy is considered so boogyman that we literally ignore it as even an option. I see people online, in documentaries, etc always talking about "but chemical rockets don't go that fast!" but never mention nuclear rockets. It's not magic, it's not the Hutchinson Effect or something, it exists and it's ignored, and I imagine once someone like Musk discovers it, he'll bring it back and say "see what I invented" and get all the credit. And, believe it or not, I'm 100% fine with that since state owned space industries are too stupid to take advantage of a technology they were going to use before most people on this web site were even born.
Lest we forget all the ships and nuclear sub marines.... guess that was too dangerous to do too, oh wait.
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