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

How come "Let's just throw a dragon dildo the size of a skyscraper into orbit" isn't something the Russians or Americans ever thought of trying?

Because they were cost plus contractors who would only do what NASA tells them to & also pays them to
SpaceX however is optimizing for costs from their end

Without reusability and modern materials it would cost too much.

Went ahead and cleaned this up a little

Orion space battleship

this

Is this another thread about that company that said it would have manned rocket launches to the ISS by this time, but has been doing just about everything else instead?

They do unmanned cargo launches to ISS. Which is almost the same.

oh, they've thought about it before

nobody has done it because the bigger a rocket is, the more expensive it is to build and test it. Plus no normal missions require that much oomph.

>my favorite autist strikes again

Back when they designed weapons that could really fuck someone's shit up

Mine's bigger than yours, pic related

Huh

I had never heard of this but it's actually REALLY close in specs to the ITS

...

because it's big and expensive, that's why

The ITS and the Orion have similar price tags

I really want to see interior shots of the ITS, I wonder how cramped it's going to be if they plan on bringing 100+ people in 1 trip... Imagine the smell from all that BO

Nat Geo's Mars series has a lot of shots of it but it's for the initial 10 crew mission but yeah

You're working with maybe 6 to 10 rooms (depending on the cargo deck partition and pressurization) on this scale. 100 people for months is a bit of a stretch.

Then again, it's larger than the Mayflower, and 135 people spent months on that. But they did live in absolute squalor and five of them died en route.

Although to be fair NASA's own Mars 2030 mission projects seven astronauts spending almost two years in THIS fucking thing

it was a shitty paper rocket, using imaginary engines, imaginary construction, etc
>hurr we'll just launch from the ocean, that'll work like magic

...

>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.