.50calBMG

Spacescifi threads... Always the same titles

Don't know why you needed that extra word at the end, could have stopped at the ellipsis. Blue made some good power points back when I was in high school 7 years ago, but so did virgin, and virgin doesn't parade around acting like they are the best and sueing people if they say otherwise... Or was that the Russians?

You can't call something safer and more reliable if the thing you are comparing it to has never been tried before. And before it gets said that starship has crashed more times than it landed successfully, so did falcon 9 until it didn't, so did airplanes before they didn't. As for leaving the Earth's SOI, that's literally what it is being built to do. Just because it hasn't done it yet doesn't mean it never will. Any plane that gets built sits a bit before it flies for the first time, but it always ends up doing exactly that.

As for something realistic (or at least as realistic as this thread can be), and now that JWST is basically ready, I'd love another cassini style mission around Saturn, but with a longer stay for the lander, or multiple landers on Titan. Otherwise, the Apollo applications program had some pretty cool ideas.

Well, Gamma is certainly one of the prettier SSTOs I've seen. Guess I know what I'm doing when I get off work today.

Flip and burn from the falcon heavy side boosters when they have an RTLS landing. All that complex choreography between them and the core, plus the exhaust plume interaction afterward.

I agree with this, dragon doesn't do anything to get to orbit, just like Starliner, it just seems to actually do its job correctly when it gets there.

I understand it is oft-2, but the actual flight test was so long ago it may as well have not happened, and this one is failing before it even gets off the ground. They are somehow making the capsule perform worse the second time. Besides, the first one was such a spectacular failure that I'm frankly amazed it landed in one piece. The only other time it flew before that, it didn't, so I'm amazed they didn't do more integrated ground testing to fix these issues before they got mounted to the rocket. Iirc, they not only had the issues with the clock, star trackers, TDRS connections, and ground station connections, but they also had multiple thrusters that outright failed. And before the SpaceX fanboy accusations come through, yes, I am aware of the dragon failures, the falcon 9 failures, and starship failures. I am not turning a blind eye to those. CRS-7 and whatever sat blew up during the pad tests should never have happened, but it is irksome to me that SpaceX gets vilified for trying something new that no human has ever done before and having a mishap, while other companies can do nothing but repeat old designs and be given different, often preferential treatment when something goes wrong. Also, I don't really count oft-1 as a flight test any more than anyone says any of the starship hop tests weren't flight tests. Oft-1 made orbit, sure, but it was so close to orbit when it started you could get away with calling that an accident, and it had nothing to do with getting there, Atlas did all the heavy lifting. If people can move goalposts against SpaceX, then we can move them against Boeing as well.

The prerequisite for a flight test is that it actually flies first...

Yes, those were all military, and they were all cryo. Anyway, before this gets any more off topic... Starliner no workey again

I never said anything about fuel, but Soyuz is cryo too. Zenit was designed from the boosters on Energia, which was a military project.

Don't forget the military heritage Soyuz and Zenit have, though. As far as rockets go, they are built like tanks. If you have a rocket that can launch from Baikonur and Kourou with minimal modification, you have a good rocket. Soyuz can launch in just about any kind of weather and be fine.

But all the extra money they got to test parts individually and qualify before flight (and be ready before Dragon), was used for QC. It's very reminiscent of the N1 now that I think about it. They pass the tests on the ground, but once the pieces are integrated, they fail spectacularly.

At least Boeing can't duplicate the SpaceX failure. Can't have a post flight failure if you can't fly.

It was a test outside the normal operational parameters that ended in failure. Starliner breaks before they can even test it.