How come "Let's just throw a dragon dildo the size of a skyscraper into orbit" isn't something the Russians or...

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>REALLY close in specs to the ITS
Not that close.

122m vs. 150m tall. 12m vs. 23m diameter. 130 MN vs. 360MN lift-off thrust.

Sea Dragon would have been basically close to triple the mass, maybe five times the volume of ITS. Close to the difference between Saturn V (35 MN lift-off thrust) and ITS.

Sea Dragon was going to be enormous and crude, made of cheap sheet steel and built by a shipbuilder, with simple pressure-fed engines. What mass-efficiency it was going to have, it was going to get from the advantages of large scale.

ITS is supposed to be big and sophisticated, made of cutting-edge carbon fiber composite with high-efficiency staged-combustion engines. It is meant to take advantage of scale while also using every other advantage to maximize performance.

They also recently successfully tested their giant fucking tanks

Dragon dildoes weren't around during the space race, all the engineers had to work with was regular dildoes.

I don't think the shots of that have anything to do with the real ITS, I'm pretty sure the ship they build for that show is just for the show itself, I doubt the real thing will look anything like that.

Serious people looked at it and thought it would work. And they validated the ocean launch plan with tests of smaller rockets.

It was conservatively designed. Look at how it has ten times as much thrust as Saturn V, yet carries under four times the payload.

It's true that it never got off the drawing board, but that wasn't because it wouldn't work or wasn't a good design. There just wasn't demand for such large launches to justify the investment.

You can see just by glancing at the outside of it that it's a very close expy for the ITS.