Comments by "Devil\x27s Offspring" (@devilsoffspring5519) on "Scott Manley" channel.

For such a 'heavy' and expensive field of endeavour, it's always interesting when someone involved in it describes it as "fun" :)
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A spacecraft's main cargo is fuel and oxygen. Everything else is by the way. Even a passenger jet on a long-range flight can take off at 1/3 fuel by weight, an orbital spacecraft is mostly fuel & oxy by weight :)
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I'm never gonna understand that, but I know it happens a lot. What the heck else would you rather watch on TELEVISION, for crying out loud, instead of your country's pinnacle of achievement?
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@Chuckiele The shuttle's main engines are extremely expensive. Mounting them on the shuttle orbiter allows them to be recovered and re-used. If the main engines were not carried by the orbiter to protect them, such as by mounting them on the back of the external tank, then there's no way to recover them--they would be destroyed on reentry along with the tank.
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@Chuckiele An item has to be specifically built to survive reentry and the external tank isn't suited for that. Large, lightweight objects that make it all the way to orbit, or nearly to orbit, cannot survive reentry. They would be too heavy for flight. So, smaller things survive reentry, big things do not--and the really expensive bits like main engines go on the small things :)
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@Chuckiele Or better yet, they're developing newer systems that seem more conventional in design, but the really expensive part (first stage) is reusable, and the second stage is expendable. So, it's much more cost effective, and it can launch both manned and unmanned payloads.
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@troys9222 Yes, chemistry is a branch of physics
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--Simplest part of the space shuttle --Designed using math that looks like 5,000 years' worth of Chinese phone books
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I wonder if my computer will still be able to work after a half a century :)
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Pretty sure the shuttle program aimed for a bit more than mere survival
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@Chuckiele That's the one :)
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