Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to re: Difficulty of space travel

Physics, not engineering
dtb — (archived)

From the Trimotor to the DC3 was a very minor step -- basically just a modest engineering improvements and gaining experience with the manufacturing and design process.

From Spaceship Two to practical, cheap, resuable, airplane like transport to orbit is still a long way off, and probably requires new basic technologies.

Even da Vinci could imagine flying machines, and things advanced very quickly after the Wright bros. What was the difference between Leonardo and Orville? The internal combustion engine, which was a fundamentally necessary development to provide a power source with a good enough thrust-to-weight ratio to make heavier than air flight possible. Give da Vinci a supply of gasoline and motors and I bet he would have figured out a workable (if fragile and inefficient) wood-and-canvas airplane.

Likewise, with chemical rockets, you have such severe constraints on vehicle mass, that when combined with the requirements for thermal protection on reeentry (which takes quite a bit of mass), you are really pushing the limits of current technology to make something with a praticably large payload. Pushing limits = "fragile and expensive".

Until we have a propulsion technology with dramatically better thrust-to-weight, that situation isn't likely to change.

Sure, improvements like minaturized electonics and carbon fiber structures and computer modelling mean Rutan has signficantly improved on the X15 w/o a propulsion breakthrough, but the requirements are hugely lower for short suborbital hops.

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