Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "The Space Race" channel.

Buddy you need to realise a few very serious thing about the big lunar rockets BOTH are sad jokes. SLS will become the case study for idiotically bad management classes in college for decades to come. The fact they never even tried to find a way to recover the main engines after each flight is absurd. Then there's the idiotic fact that 2 separate teams repeat each others work. Due to politics nobody cancelled the second team and senator is willing to create unemployed people in their electorate. Starship is Elon's personal 1950s sci-fi fantasy rocket, with so many practical issues it will never to a tiny fraction as his PR machine blurts out constantly. That whole refuelling thing to be done in 1/2 an hour so they can fly another launch in a few hours is idiotic garbage at its finest. Do any of you people who don't fly ever consider why every pilot does a walk around check of the plane before they fly it? Machinery that's pushed that hard needs to be fully inspected and checked between flights. Even small failures are catastrophic. If you guys don't want to end up in 10 years time angry and frustrated as my generation is then you need to stop the fantasy and stick with reality. I watched the last men walk on the moon with class mates. Years later when I was doing aerospace engineer we all expected to build the Freedom space station and go back to the moon. Then Challenger happened and that clubbed us with a harsh dose of reality. Its taken Elon nearly 20 years to replicate what NASA did in the 1960s. At his disposal was all that experience, and all the technology developed through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. PLUS he had gathered, by luck, one of the best rocket teams the world has ever seen to develop Falcon. AND they still took 20 years to put men into space. Even sadder still is that Boeing had even more resources, more experience, more government funding and more time and they haven't even made it that far.
6
As an aerospace engineer I can tell you quite simply the problem isn't IF or WHEN the problems are how we keep people alive up there and we get people to & from the moon reliably. These are 2 problems that have been well understood for decades. I have a classmate who is now quite high up at NASA in the ISS management program. Basically she is has one of a couple of signatures that without your stuff doesn't go to the ISS. About 20 years we were arguing over the ISS and slow it was progressing and what that meant to go back to the moon and then possibly beyond. She was very blunt about 2 subjects. Until we solved the issue of life support and the issue of propulsion NOBODY was going beyond low earth orbit. If you go through the math a 1/4 pounder is about $10k to get to the ISS. You need to multiply that by 100 to get it onto the moon. We all take for granted that the Earth cleans our air cleans, our water, deals with our sh*t and provides us with food. We need to able to replicate those basic functions which when you get into them are damn complex. This is what Elon Musk and his fanbots wont listen to when it comes to the Moon or Mars. This what so many of the other fan based programmes wont listen to. Then on propulsion, so long as we are limited to chemical rockets for orbital transfers then mass is a problem. There's a reason why Buzz Aldrin's LOR (Lunar Orbit Rendezvous) was the mission profile that won out. Its optimises the mass transfers and reduces the fuel required. Go watch Don Petits the "Tyranny of the Rocket Equation" TEDx talk to get your head around that. If you break it down as Buzz did the requirements of the vehicle needed to land on the moon is radically different from the requirements to go to and from the moon. Its better to have separate vehicles for those tasks. Its why Elon's Lunar Starship is actually a bad joke he's pulled from B-grade 1950s sci-fi. The reason why Apollo worked was because they stuck to the functional tasks required. Remember the task was "put a man on the moon then get him back safely." It wasn't, lets do a parade and tell everyone how big our rocket is or anything else. They made small improvements each mission without causing issues. That final Saturn V was actually smaller than the 8, 10 & 12 engine behemoths that other mission profiles like EOR (Earth Orbit Rendezvous) called for.
4
As an aerospace engineer I can tell you that idea is way to much Star Trek and way too little reality. The whole problem we currently have is getting materials into space from Earth. Say if you wanted to build a spaceship that weighed 1,000 metric tons. That's a 1,000,000kgs of raw material needed to be put into space and at around $10,000 per kilo the cost isn't building the vehicle its putting all the stuff up there. Then there's all the people and stuff required to do the assembly up there. How do you think they magically get up there and then stay alive? I love Star Trek and most Sci-fi, except for one thing. They have all oversimplified by a staggering amount of what it takes to go into space. Its actually very very hard to keep people alive in space. We all forget the Earth cleans our air, cleans our water, cleans our sh*t and provides us with food. There's none of that in space and the few programs trying to do that have been starved of resources since Apollo.
4
@zroku123 Please tell me your under 15 years of age. Because space elevators are impossible for the Earth. There's enough debunks around with details but here's the main points. Arthur C Clarke was one of the early proponents of the idea and then did some basic math and basic math crushed it 30+years ago. Even if we had some magic hyper-fibre strong enough for the job there's the issue of building it. And then even if you could build it there's the issue of air drag and weather. And after that there's the issue of powering it. For Earth its impossible but for the Moon its another thing entirely. No air means no drag. Low gravity makes everything more practical. Best of all, there's no existing society that you might drop it onto. As an aerospace engineer I find it frustrating that people keep bringing up debunked ideas. So please don't waste your own time let alone others on stuff like space elevators.
3
@barzillaiconcorde685 WTF are you talking about? If its about trying to build a space elevator then like the other fool you have never considered all the factors in volved. I have no idea why anyone is even trying to push this fantasy. Arthur C Clarke who was on the people who actually wrote about it also DISMISSED IT. He wrote a NON-fiction book called "Profiles of the Future" in which he discussed a number of technologies that science fiction writers (including himself) had used in their fictional stories. H goes over the practical aspects of whether they are practical or possible and if possible what sorts of technologies we'd need to develop. The space elevator was a technology he covered and he DISMISSED IT as simply impractical even if some magic fibre could be developed that would handle the loads.
3
Imagine of there were some space junkies who didn't make ridiculous claims every time they opened their mouths and made another video of hype and nonsense. I'm actually an aerospace engineer and think Falcon Heavy is fabulous but I had to stop listening to this diatribe of hype and nonsense at 38 seconds. Starship is folly and totally unnecessary when you have Falcon & Crew Dragon combined with Falcon Heavy. You have the means to put serious chunks of hardware into orbit at an affordable price as well as get people up and down. Starship has just been a colossal waste of money and time. New Glenn (or whatever Bezos is calling it) is also a similar colossal waste of money and time. They should have learnt from Apollo and the Russian N-1 that big rockets can only work with a small number of super powerful engines. Otherwise its so complicated that even a minor failure is fatal.
2
Its called the James Web Telescope and its just started taking its photos.
2
@benjaminrickdonaldson Do you have any idea how far off we are with a surface base for the moon? Here's one interesting fact the day on the moon is 14 days of light followed by 14 days of darkness. Kirk Sorenson (the guy in many of the Thorium reactor vids) worked at NASA on powering a lunar base. The conclusion around 20 years ago was that you need something other than solar for the primary supply to a lunar base. Solar can be used to supplement it but solar can't be the primary supply with out a damn big battery and that would be very heavy and at about $200 to 400,000 per kilo landed on the moon very very expensive. Its a big problem that no one is close to solving and until they do a lunar base is out. A reusable habitat for crews to use for 10-14 day stints is a realistic proposition.
2
@Skinflaps_Meatslapper I'm actually Australian but went to college in America in the late 80s. I was there when Reagans Star Wars was the big game in town. Most of us realised it wasn't going to work, especially the post grads, but they were on scholarships so they kept that part quiet and go there degrees. As an undergrad our focus was Space Station Freedom which we expected to build and then be back on the moon circa 2001. The first major hint all was not going well was when SSF got canned after the 3rd attempt. It 1st came in with a $20Billion price tag and VP Bush freaked out and said it had to cost less. So they came back with a redesign that had a price tag of $30 Billion and VP Bush went bananas and re-iterated "cheaper." On the 3rd attempt they had a price tag of $40 Billion and VP Bush said "FK-OFF." While we were pondering that Challenger happened. I'd actually been in Florida only 2weeks earlier and seen Columbia take off. Sadly we were 60 miles away but even at that distance it was spectacular. Probably the saddest part of the last 40+ years has been the exploitation of the research funding. If you look through the X-Planes there's a significant number of "never delivered" projects that really should have delivered. If you look at the X-38 crew return vehicle, what a wasted opportunity. Its compatriot the X37 ACTUALLY WORKS so why didn't they just scale it up and man rate it for 4-6 people? Its no different here in Australia. We finally got a Space Agency a few years back. One of its first publications was a "Road Map" for Australia's space future. The VERY FIRST item detailed was "Advanced Space Based Water Management" with the hope it would be available in the mid 2030s. So I spent my own time and money doing a detail project plan using air launched small satellites based on a scaled down Pegasus XL. Because funding here isn't that great I went with money I knew was available because there were a couple of very controversial over funded security contracts. I ended up with a budget of $720 Million and got told to go away. Then they gave our Air Force $7 Billion (10x as much) for a Space Program based around some of the ideas I had seen FAIL as part of the Reagan Star Wars program 35 years earlier. So I have a fairly nuanced (frustrated) and critical view of these matters of WASTE and STUPIDITY.
1
@zroku123 And I guess you never heard the reason that satellites aren't made from carbon fibre is because it breaks down in the space environment? Seriously are you that ignorant. Work hard in high school and try and get into a decent engineering school. If you are really lucky and get to work with some decent people in about 35 years you'll have enough experience to play this game.
1