Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Of Rockets, Shuttles and Planes" video.

  1. Sorry to burst the bubble but I am an aerospace engineer and Star Raker was NEVER GOING TO WORK AS PLANNED or SHOWN in this video. The only credible person I ever heard say he could actually make an SST work was Kelly Johnson (lead engineer for the U2 & SR71) but he was ignored by congress in the late 80s. I'm normally a huge fan of CSS but before they posted this they really should have asked the right people. Elon's Starship is nonsense but its not the only nonsense that's been put forward for spaceflight. The most obvious thing to me (because we worked this out in the 1970s) are that its wings are far to large for a spaceplane. Those stubby looking wings on the Space Shuttle are actually very large for a space plane. If you look at many of the pater SST variants like the X30, X37 they have tiny wings. And lets NOT FORGET that the X-37 actually works. It actually took lessons from the Space Shuttle and there are a lot of ENGINEERS who think that it was a step in the right direction. After the giant wing its the pointy nose which is great for supersonic flight and the worst thing possible for re-entry. The reason the Space Shuttle and X-37 have very blunt noses is to create a massive bow shock wave that not only slows the vehicle down but protects the rest of the spaceplane from the re-entry heat. So that big wing and point nose might look good but they AREN'T. After that the list of issues just adds and adds.
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  2.  @seemlesslies  Thanks mate. Its not just an aerospace thing. I'm seeing it everywhere with technology reporting. I'm Australian but did my degree in America so I watch a lot of what's going on there as well as other parts of the world and its the same everywhere. All I see are journalists and media clowns dropping buzz words like "AI" and "hypersonic" as some way of saying "What I am saying is 100% accurate." I just heard it this morning. We're having a huge debate over submarines and yet again a journalist was using the "AI" buzzword. Last week it was "hypersonic missiles" and the week before that "space lasers"_ 🤦‍♂🤦‍♂ The other thing I hate are the people who take highly polarised stances without using common sense. I like channels like CSS but damn they get arrogant if they get called out on anything. I started another thread about some things in this video that are just plain wrong. Towards the end they insinuate that air launching requires a 50-50 split in labor and that's just nonsense. Go and look at the response I got from CSS. Do I think Elon is generally a clown who speaks nonsense? ABSOLUTELY YES and he deserves to be outed, but that doesn't mean he hasn't done a couple of decent things even if he lucked into them. Yeah he lucked into Tesla and yeah he's done some stupid things but he's also managed to kick the auto industry out of its shell and got them moving on electric and hybrid drive systems. Yeah SpaceX has some issues but damn its also kicked the US space industry out of its lethargy. That last Soyuz seat cost NASA $80 million. Crew Dragon costs NASA $70 million for 4 seats. SpaceX has broken the strangle hold that Boeing, Rockwell, Lockheed,... etc. have had on the US Space Program. Breaking that stranglehold is arguably the best thing to happen to manned spaceflight since Apollo. The risk is that in his pursuit of attention Elon will send it right back to where its been. I don't know when you graduated, but I graduated in 87/88 and I've watched 2 generations lose their hopes and dreams on the BS of those few companies. We should have built Space Station Freedom in the 90s and been back on the moon by 2001 AS WAS PLANNED. We've lost almost 30 years on the hamster wheel going nowhere fast. My great fear is that Starship is just another hamster wheel. Sorry for the rant.
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  3.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  On your comment about specialised vehicles. Sorry but there are so many examples of specialised vehicles outperforming general vehicles in their specialised role that its barely worth considering. There are literally 100s of examples of cars, boats, airplanes, tools, machines,... etc. Here's the simplest I can think of - the spork (a combination fork and spoon). Its not as good of a fork as a real fork or as good of a spoon as a real spoon but then forks are almost useless as spoons and spoons are almost as useless as forks wile a spork can do both well enough that campers use them because it saves space and weight in their rucksack.
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  4. Go and have a look at the Russian Moon Rocket the N-1. See what happened when they tried and you'll understand that people who know have known for a long time that starship was going to have these issues.
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  5.  @classydave75  Skylon is an interesting one. The idea that they could cool that much air that quickly always struck me as a bit odd. There was something not well explained about that engine.]io890 A pointy nose really is a bad thing for re-entry type flight. A blunt nose produces a detached or bow shock wave and it effectively produces a protective layer. The vehicle still cops a hammering but its just not as bad as as pointy nose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_shock_(aerodynamics) A pointed nose has the shock attached and that means the tip gets the full blast of re-entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_wave
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  6.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  You're partly right and definitely on the right thinking process. If you look at the basic tasks for going to the moon or mars. You have 3 basic tasks. Get up and back from the Earth. Get to and from the Moon or Mars. Get up and back from the Moon or Mars. You don't need to be an engineer to realise those are 3 fairly different tasks. That's why Apollo worked, they actually broke the mission down to manageable tasks. You are quite right Star Raker (if it can work) would be great for one task but lousy for almost everything else.
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  7.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  That's not a bad thought except that starship itself is a compromised design that's trying to do too much in the first place. That's the real problem with Starship its trying to be too many things. This is a common trait with almost everything in engineering. Here's an example. One of the fundamental criticisms of the F35 is that its trying to be so many aircraft that it simply fails in certain aspects. In ground attack and close in support of ground troops its Ok but compared to the A10 its hopeless because the A10 is dedicated to that role. I am no SpaceX fan but its why Crew Dragon is such a success. I know CSS wont agree but it simply is a success. The last US seat on a Soyuz mission cost $80 million. Currently crew Dragon costs $70 million for 4 people or $17.5 million per seat. That's better than a 75% saving. But then what else can Crew Dragon do other than get people up to the ISS and back down from the ISS? Not much. What's needed then is a vehicle that just goes to and back from the Moon or Mars and then another to get down and back from the Moon or Mars. Because if you try and combine those tasks you start making compromises and in the end that wont work as well.
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  8.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  This is in reply to your nuclear thermal engines comment. They were first proposed back in the 1960s and this is a classic case of people looking back at old ideas who don't ask the most important question: "Why didn't it work back then?" Yes there is the possibility NT engines will offer an improvement, but nobody has even proven they can actually work. Its a classic case of people confusing ideas with reality. Sometimes even great ideas just don't work. Proverbially speaking 99.99% of all technology ideas never go anywhere for one or more basic reasons. When engineers do projects they generally look at dozens of solutions and end up dismissing all but 1. Its not that the other ideas were bad or would not work they just choose the best option for that CIRCUMSTANCE. Here's one of the best examples I know of. Its a 2011 TEDx Talk by MIT postgrads Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie about Waste Annihilating nuclear reactors. At the time it was genuine 1000% game changing technology and it wasn't from some flunky amateur. These were 2 super smart MIT kids with a brilliant idea. Here's their 2001 TEDx talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAFWeIp8JT0 When I checked where they were at a couple of years ago they had folded the company after spending over $100 Million in funding. They made all their research and development free for the world to use. Way back at the very start they had missed a very basic item that they had taken for granted and their method was NEVER GOING TO WORK in the way they conceived it. Its a lesson for all the people who dig up technologies from the past. You MUST ASK: "Why didn't it work?"
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  9. ​ @ivannoreland5656  And which one has FLOWN. NOT a test on a stand but an actual flight. Yeah dude anyone can look up and find they built Kiwi, Phoebus, NRX/EST, NRX/XE, Pewee, Pewee 2, and the Nuclear Furnace BUT they never got close to an actual engine that could be flown. If you want to claim its yet ANOTHER "what might have been if we hadn't wasted money on dumb stuff!" Then I will back you any day of the week. If you want to complain about some of the programs that were never followed through on. Then even better. I'll lead the protest march on that. Go look at the X-planes for the number of projects that were cut right when they started to produce results. 2 of my favs are the X-33 and X-38. Do you know they had 3 more X-15 variants on the drawing board. There was a 2 seater, a delta wing and a scramjet powered version of the delta wing. They'd already proven by that stage they could do supersonic combustion. I read and quoted the paper by Billig on the first successful SSC experiments in my masters thesis. If you look through the list of lost opportunities it gets pretty frustrating.
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  10.  @kwyj  No Johnson never did say anything apart from "Don't waste the money on a replacement shuttle. Give it to me and leave us alone to get the job done." Its a stack of questions I have had for 35+ years. "What did he know?" "What did they work out?" I can't conceive that KJ was just mouthing off. Go watch any of the vids about his life. Yeah sure he occasionally shook the establishment with radical designs (P-38, U-2, SR-71), BUT HE DELIVERED and they WORKED. 🤷‍♂🤷‍♂🤷‍♀🤷‍♀
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  11.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  This is in reply to your Mars & Earth atmosphere comment. Yes Mars has an atmosphere but it is completely different to Earth's. The surface air pressure of Mars is 0.00628atm so there might be an atmosphere but there's so little its hard to do anything with it. parachutes only work enough to slow down from very high speed. That little helicopter they tried was on the very limit of actually working. Quoting Wikipedia on Mars under the topic of "Atmosphere": "The highest atmospheric density on Mars is equal to that found 35 kilometres (22 mi) above Earth's surface." The density of Mars atmosphere is a tiny fraction of Earths and all the equations for lift and drag have the same basic formula of 1/2 x the coefficient x the gas density x times velocity squared. Lift = 1/2.Cf.ρ.V² Drag = 1/2.Cd.ρ.V² So when ρ is so low you either have to be very light, very large wings or going incredibly fast. Mars atmosphere is so low there's almost nothing to generate lift or drag with. It will make getting off the surface a lot easier, but not much else.
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  12.  @LennyAllen-cp9cl  And one other thing. Can you and every other unqualified person please STOP repeating the PR blurbs for various technologies as if they are undisputable facts when they ARE YET TO BE PROVEN. Maybe and possibly ARE NOT the same as "Look at these results." Its actually very frustrating having to explain again and again and again ... and 1000 more times that what you are hearing the media is mostly PR aimed at fundraising or lobbying rather than reporting news or facts. I don't mind people asking questions and having discussions and I will take the time to answer peoples legitimate questions as best I can. Its taken me time to read your replies and answer them. Please show me some respect for my qualifications and experience because it gets damn annoying when people start preaching PR fundraising nonsense as if its undeniable fact.
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