This rocket was designed to lift the same payload to LEO as Musk's rocket (550 tons)

There's a point where rockets get too big but we're not there yet. We should keep building them bigger, cheaper and more efficient for the foreseeable future.

Dont get it, are they sending u're moms anal beads to space???

>that's how big a rocket actually has to be to lift 550 tons
Sea Dragon was a pretty mass-inefficient, low-Isp design, built of cheap steel and with pressure-fed engines. Extra mass and reduced specific impulse, of course, incur large performance penalties in an orbital launch vehicle (although it gains something back from using hydrogen in its upper stage). That's why it would have needed to be about twice the mass of ITS to get a similar payload, even with ITS's costly flyback booster recovery and propulsive landing upper stage.

>Wouldn't launching a rocket out of the water be an absolute engineering nightmare?
No, they tried it, it's pretty easy. They were kind of surprised by how easy it was.

>How could it even ignite with all that back pressure?
Well, Sea Dragon's chamber pressure was supposed to be 20 atmospheres. You've got to go about 200 meters down before the ambient pressure reaches that level, and Sea Dragon is only 150 meters long, so it would have to be deep underwater for backpressure to prevent the propellant flowing into the chamber normally.

Whether the chamber is initially filled with air or water at startup is just something you have to account for in the design.

I'm more interested in seeing Rockoon (balloon-booster rockets) happen. Hydrogen balloons would carry the vehicle 32 miles up where a regular rocket could accelerate it up into orbit. Basically pic related but huge.

That's fucking stupid.

Stupidity is the basis for engineering user.
The outrageous has worked before, it can work again so long as it is feasible.

That's fucking stupid

why not just fill the balloons with vacuum?

>fill the balloons with vacuum
That's actually not an awful idea once you get up to very high altitudes. It's being studied for use on Mars (which has air pressure at the surface equivalent to very high altitudes on Earth).

When the air pressure gets low enough, a structure to support a vacuum chamber starts to work better than a balloon filled with a light gas.

Is that a dildo on top of a coffee cup?