Name a better spaceship

Yuri's BOCTOK is /effay/

OP said rockets, not memes

Admittedly, that was an issue. But as the guy who always comes in here to post about making the rocket safer instead of worrying about escape systems always said it's better to make the rocket safe than worrying about escape systems. Gemini had a perfect safety record at launch, and the ejector seats were never used.

Yuri was a hero, and Vostok was an achievement, but it was not really much of a spacecraft. All it could do was rotate on three axes and then re-enter.

The first is not really going to be the best. All props to Korolev, and Gagarin, of course, for doing it at all.

BIG

guy

>people were brave into to travel to the moon in a tin can
It's almost inhuman to think about

Lmao I can see how fake it is withought even clicking on the thumbnail

Gemini guys proposed sending a Gemini mission to circumnavigate the moon, when it became clear that Apollo was delayed and fears of the Russians getting a first there arose.

Gemini could have done it, it had demonstrated the ability to keep a crew alive, though cramped as fuck, for as long as the longest projected lunar landing missions, I flyby would have been a piece of cake.

31 engines.

Are they, and I ask this in all seriousness, insane?

I highly doubt the gemini capsule had a heat shield that could handle aerobraking from a lunar free return trajectory

Gemini never had to use the ejection seats but the craft had many problems of its own.
Until the Challenger disaster the Shuttle had a perfect record but it's obvious to everyone now that it was a flawed design.
Gemini had its problems, and it was built at a time when spaceflight was a lot more experimental, they couldn't guarantee safety, they wouldn't need the ejection seats either then, but the seats were a shitty choice for launch escape.

no, they're just dumb an have never heard of the N-1

They would have had to upgrade the heat shield. But these spacecraft were all one-off builds anyway, always adapted and upgraded from the last one, so that would have been something they could upgrade maybe faster than waiting for Apollo to be ready to fly.

And of course the contractors building the Gemini were eager to identify continuing missions for their spacecraft.

How many engine failures have they had on Falcon 9s so far?

>Gemini never had to use the ejection seats but the craft had many problems of its own.

keep talkin'.

>seats were a shitty choice for launch escape

I agree, as did the guys who flew it. But if you never have to use them, it doesn't matter. They would have been better off removing that weight and recognizing that the Titan was working well enough that an escape mechanism was not needed, particularly one as dangerous as the ejection seats.

even if you look at total success rates there only at 93% compared to a 95% industry standard
no one is gonna fly commercial if 1 in 20 of these things fails

Not the point -- any engine design can fail. If you have 30 of them, you are 6 times as likely to have a failure as you would be with 5 bigger engines if the failure rate could be made the same. Plus all the extra pipes, wires, valves, connections, etc. that you need to deal with lots of engines instead of a few.

We KNOW safe big engines are feasible, they were building them in the 60s with 60s era materials tech and manufacturing processes.

at that point you're pretty much making a whole new craft, though
>bigger badder heat shield to handle the deceleration
>the rest of the spacecraft needs to be strengthened to handle other aerodynamic forces of the return as well, probably modified to handle an entirely different descent profile
>all of this is going to be quite a bit heavier so you'll need to account for that in addition to the extra delta-v needed to send it around the moon in the first place
it was far outside the scope of the gemini program

>We KNOW safe big engines are feasible
The Raptor is not a small engine
They have optimized around thrust to weight
Plus engines cannot be big if you want to be able to land, most ESPECIALLY if you want engine out survivability while landing

Clusters of engines are the future, for cost reasons, for optimized thrust to weight, for modularity(aka using just one engine on all stages/vehicles), and for being able to land reliably.

Enjoy reenacting the flight of the N-1.

I don't see this happening, at least not as many times.
With the Heavy they're going to be having almost as many engines all working and talking to each other. They should be able to pretty much get it right for BFR.

If they can make 400+ engines that all work fine, they can manage 22 or however many they are going for now

That is why you are a cuck.

Huh, it seemed bigger on TV.

Well, getting it "pretty much right" is close enough, I guess.

youtube.com/watch?v=m79UO4HOQmc

>not replying with FUCKING and then someone responding to that post with ROCKET

Fuck off if you can't meme correctly.

>any engine design can fail.

If one of your big engines fail, you are screwed. If your small engine fails and you have many other engines for redundancy, then you can still land and it is a much safer design.

Reliable rockets require an engine out capability, just like commercial planes have.

X-37

Fuck crew

Implying Saturn V with5 big engines did not have engine-out capability. They lost an engine on two of the flights.

Implying shutdown is the only mode of failure, and KaBOOM is not an option, in which case fewer opportunities for failure are a Good Thing.

Implying I care anything about the convention of green-texting implications.

Space flight never happened

This.

Early Space flight hat such amazing picture quality todays pictures look shit and unesthaethic in comparison