I remember growing up with things proudly advertised as "space-age technology"... which largely meant the 1950s and 1960s, and of course it's what got us to the moon, multiple times. Yet more than a half a century later, new rockets just don't seem that impressive in comparison.
We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs, 20x increase in launches/year, significantly increased reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason), and reliable vertical landings with reusable lower stages.
The current crop of rockets may not be as visually impressive as a Saturn 5, but they are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity rather than a risky experiment
We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago [1]
> reliability during missions (test explosions like this one are tests for a reason)
Static fire tests are routine since the 60s, nothing new here either [2].
> We have 15x reduction in payload-to-orbit costs
This is about manufacturing optimization and it has very little to do with rocket safety.
> hey are well on their way to making orbital space flight a commodity
They are not. It is at best marketing speech. The access to space is at best cheaper but will never be commodity.
The parent post is right on point: Rockets todays are still fundamentally the same giant bomb filled at 85% with explosive that we were making in the 60s. And this is unlikely to change and unlikely to ever be safe.
There is very valid reasons to that: we still did not find anything better than chemical propulsion to go in the last 80 years. It is the only 'working' solution in term of the energy density required to bring us there:
- Ion thrusters have amazing Isp but nowhere the Thrust/Weight ratio required to launch from Earth.
- Nuclear propulsion is good on paper but controversial in practice for pretty obvious reasons.
So we are still stuck. Stuck with burning 1'000t of highly inflammable Ergols in few minutes to just push any blob in orbit. With very thin engineering margins, way thiner than in airplane manufacturing or currently pretty any other domain.
And that make it unlikely to ever be really "safe" and accessible to the mass.
At least, not before we find a better solution to the problem.
> We know how to do reliable vertical landing since the DCXA in 1991. Meaning more than 25y ago
One could argue the applicability of "reliable" given the project's track record, but it's not really relevant in any case since that program only got up a few kilometers and nowhere near orbital velocity.
Hire all those smart people who waste their lives being quants and steer them in the direction of something useful.
Unfortunately, this is not the way the world is going right now.
Physics research, and generally speaking fundamental research, is publicly funded.
Meaning, most of the time, under funded.
We've had this technology for ~70 years. That's 0.0035% of our species lifetime. That's pretty new.
We're used to thinking of things in human time scales, but it took us how long to master fire? And then smelt metals? And then learn mathematics...? These things take time for a species to master.
Then it took roughly 50 years of progress to make space flight cheap enough that the economics make sense. With a couple setbacks a long the way that might have cost us a decade or two
It's a form of manners from those days so that people know that I'm not just spamming something. I think a lot of the people who used to write like that are gone. Most metaphorically, some physically. I'm trying to keep the tradition alive.