Like do people really think that there's better shapes to go with? And if people really believe this, what part of our public education system failed them most? Because my money is on critical thinking.
Fwiw, I'm at least glad that single word seems to be the only part of the comment above you found objectionable.
Face it man, people making fun of dick shaped rockets are seeing dicks where no one else is seeing them and calling themselves clever.
Fwiw the space plane I was referring to above was SS2, not a NASA vehicle. But yes, I agree, it is unlikely to be good for doing "real work in space". Which is the actual substantive point here, irrespective of vehicle shape.
Just to repeat since you seem to have missed it in my comment above: the phallic comment was not, I repeat NOT a literal commentary on rocket design. Yes, good rockets are long and cylindrical. Not what I was referring to.
If you want to make it into a discussion about comparing & contrasting impacts, you're going to have to take the collective impacts of those pushing the space-colony agenda: everything from perpetuating individual road transport & UK airline companies to the largest "bookstore" in the world and lots in between.
Space exploration is an extremely important and worthy scientific endeavour & orgs like NASA have been criminally underfunded for decades.
What is absolutely not worthwhile and shouldn't even uttered in the same breath as the history of efforts on ISS and similar, is a bunch of budding space cowboys sending phallic representations of themselves into orbit on PR missions and hiding their own destructive impact on our planet behind a colinist fantasy so thin only a complete scientific illeterate would fall for it.
SpaceX has contributed positively to benign public missions by being a contractor, but all the marketing bullshit outside of that around Mars is demonstrably nonsense.
> a bit of critical thinking
Indeed.