Re:Starship goes up. Starship goes down. But is the program ...
by _joel on Saturday March 06, 2021 @11:57AM
(#26368699)
Everything is harder or more dangerous that's not been done. Otherwsie it would have been already, right?
I get your point but things become normalised over time and mechanisms/technology invented to deal with the risk and conditions. If you'd said to people 150 years ago that there would be (well pre-covid days) at any one time about a million people at 30k feet flying around in basically a tin can, journeying across the world in a day, they'd say you're mad and it's too dangerous to achieve. They didn't have the technology capable, like a jet engine or fabrication techniques. Maybe in 50 years we do have a new technology that meets the crtieria needed, maybe not, but the same happened before and I'm sure it'll happen again.
Planes glide, and are generally only unsafe during a few critical moments after tire-lift.
Planes that don't glide are generally considered unsafe and highly specialized.
I fail to wrap my head around how a mechanism that uses active propulsion for all phases of flight could ever match the safety of a mechanism that exploits passive physics in the face of active propulsion system-failure.
That said, I couldn't tell you how to achieve space-flight otherwise except for maybe a shuttle-lander type system -- I am simply stating that the comparison of risk between air travel and space travel seems absurd to me.
Of course space travel would be more dangerous.