DerekL1963

It's partly that, partly that handling significant amounts of explosives solid rockets is rather more difficult. Finding a site to manufacture explosives build the mixing and pouring facilities is a challenge as opposed to unfuelled liquid stages, which are inert. Transporting explosives them from factory to the launch site requires a metric [censored] ton of permits and paper, while unfuelled liquids can simply be tossed on the back of a truck. Once at the launch site, solids are much, much heavier and increasing handling difficulty. Etc... etc...

Nobody is talking about laying new rails or cutting new channels but you. The point is, Boca Chica is not nearly as isolated as Chimborazo, not by a very long shot.

0.o What does the location of the spaceport have to do with the difficulties they're having with the engine and airframe?

The problem is, big rooms aren't any more useful than small rooms - it's the stuff in the room that makes it useful. All that stuff still has to get up there and be installed somehow.

It gets around a lot of issues... but it significantly increases programmatic risk due to the large number of launches and rendezvouses required. The length of time the first pieces will be on orbit prior to departure will be an issue as well.

Which means you were miles and miles from the railhead at Brownsville. So, where you walked or slept the night or whatever is essentially meaningless. Here in the 21st century, we have the ability to build roads.

Not only do you need circularization, you also will have extraordinary difficulties trying to do anything resembling a pitchover (typically called a gravity turn in KSP, especially before 1.0). 0.o A gun fired projectile doesn't need to perform a pitch maneuver/gravity turn in the first place, it's not a powered vehicle and doesn't fly like a powered vehicle does. It needs an attitude control system for the circularization burn. o.0 No, you don't need to be going horizontal or nearly so. (Though that does minimize the size of your circularization burn.)

Rail, boca, no, boca has sand, lots of it, it has lots of spanish dagger, rattlesnakes, aliens, border patrol agents, a plaque signifying the last battle of the civil war. Funny. I guess the rail lines marked on the map and visible in the imagery are figments of Google's imagination then. (Or not.) Rail doesn't have to go all the way to the site to be very useful.

Nobody with any sense ever trusted them in the first place.

Well they are going to build a space port in Boca Chica, not many people have been to boca chica, but I have, its not exactly the middle of somewhere. Doesn't have to be in the middle of somewhere - it has rail access, highway access, water access, and air access. Chimborazo not so much.

No possibly about it - any gun launch system will require something that can circularize the orbit. This is a consequence of orbital mathematics - all orbits must pass through the point where the orbital velocity was last changed, E.G. the muzzle of the gun.

How do you know this so surely? But noticing the complete lack of an noticeable change. Nobody outside of the Usual Suspects is calling for an increase in NASA budget. By noticing no increased coverage of NASA in the news. Etc... etc... etc... I don't live in the space fandom echo chamber, which means I see the real world.

Laugh all you want, that doesn't change reality. And where do I not look at the Google-X prize positively? (Not only have I not discussed the contest itself, addressing the truth is neither positive nor negative except to those who wish to deny it. That's not 'positivity', that's delusion.)

You are not the only person in the world, so presuming that because you don't know nobody else does is... simply ludicrous. And SpaceX's 'popularity' is limited largely to the ill educated and ill informed echo chamber of space fandom, who are essentially irrelevant.

The Apollo program already existed. It changed, yes, but that doesn't change the fact that it already existed. Heck, the F-1s were old designs by the time they first flew. They had to be changed, too. Mainly to fix the combustion instability. Nobody has claimed that the Apollo program didn't already exist, so, how exactly is that relevant? And the age of the F-1's and the fixes for combustion instability are equally irrelevant. Since the discussion revolves around the one we did get, the one that never progressed beyond paper is irrelevant. Yeah - the one thing that defined the entire program and determined the mission architecture is the one thing JFK did.

Presuming Khruschev isn't ousted in '64 as he was in OTL.

Apollo was conceived before he became president.... In fact, various Saturn designs were presented to Eisenhower... Which is relevant, how exactly? The Apollo Program, before Kennedy, was a paper program mostly intended as an general purpose Earth orbiter and the vague goal of going to the Moon at some distant date in the future. The Apollo Program as we understand it today, a program focused on going to the moon "by the end of the decade", is completely a creation of JFK.

I suspect the punch through may have had as much to do with the high lateral velocity and the hard touchdown as it does with raw vertical velocity.

Playing KSP isn't required to not grasp the principles of engineering or to have other bad intellectual habits. It just reinforces them.

Well the Ansari X prize did do something, it created Virgin Galactic, and in a few years, people with a quarter of a million dollars )Maybe less when they really get going, perhaps 100 grand) will get to go to space, so it may take awhile, but something will definitely come out of it. While you weasel and try and change the subject and put words in my mouth, the brutal ugly truth remains - it did not noticeably change public perceptions or measurably or noticeably change the level of public interest. And no matter how often Majorjim repeats the Space Enthusiasts Articles Of Faith, the truth remains the truth.

Let's just hope enough are to make it possible. They aren't and the Google X-prize won't change that any more than the Ansari X-prize did.

Apples and oranges to some degree. Don't get confused by the broken wing because that's not the point of the test, the expectation of the certification test is that at a given load the wing will not fail. (That's why the cheers when the wing reaches 150% loading, it passed the test.) The test-to-fail is somewhat separate, private, test by the builder to ensure that they didn't build the wing too strong. Too strong means too heavy which means the aircraft will operate at a weight penalty, something the customers won't like very much, This is somewhat different than the most recent test by Space-X, where they went into the test knowing there was an exceptionally high chance of hull loss.

Before it can be like exploration hundreds of years ago, there has to be something worth the money and risk - with rare exceptions, folks didn't go exploring for science, or for glory, or for the sheer heck of it. They went because if they were successful, they hoped to reap massive commercial and economic (read big, big, BIG bucks) returns from the voyages. We do accept risks far greater than office work - what we don't do is accept stupid risks to fuel the fantasies of ill informed space enthusiasts.

It won't. People simply aren't interested.

The key element being JFK was dead - and the Apollo Program was his monument. His plans for collaboration and cooperation grew out of his concerns over the risks and the ever ballooning cost estimates for Apollo, and are often interpreted as potentially being a prelude to withdrawing support.