“I can see so many sick and impoverished children from up here!”
—Jeff Bezos, probably
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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As though he cares to look.
They were obstructing the view.
They should have opened the door on his space travel
Look at the earliest airplanes. Little things made out of cotton and balsa that couldn't outrace a strong horse.
Look at the earliest video games.
edit = I'm not a Bezos fanboy, but if we're going to have space travel there are going to be stunts, just like there were back in barnstormer days.
Space travel is not the same.
Strictly considering low earth orbit, one needs to accelerate a payload to 25,000 km/h and like 500km above the ground. This is not computation or atmospheric flight. There's no shortcut, no engineering to work out, the physics dictates this is a hard problem. Solutions:
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You go up with a chemical rocket, where almost all the launch mass is fuel. To get the ratio in your head, think the liquid in a coke can vs the can that holds it... that's the mass/fuel ratio we're dealing with, and tricks like hybrid engines or booster returns barely soften the MASSIVE cost for even the tiniest things you send up.
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You assist it from the ground. "Gun" launches, as some are developing (and that I'm quite enthusiastic about), can't launch humans. Stratolaunches (from planes) only get you partway there, more like a booster.
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You go nuclear. This is the only way to increase energy density vs. chemical rockets enough to make a difference. Needless to say, there are significant environmental/safety concerns when doing this on the ground, and I'm as pro-nuclear as anyone you'll find. Check out Atomic Rockets for more on this, with concrete theoretical designs that are still batshit crazy: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php
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You develop a space elevator or some analogue. No commercial launch research is even pretending to develop this, and it would require massive materials science breakthroughs.
...That's it. That's how you get to space. This isn't a "Wright Brothers vs modern jets" thing, that kind of cost optimization is just not physically possible. And whenever Musk lies through his teeth about practically colonizing Mars, people need to understand that...
I'm going to approach this from the perspective of someone playing Kerbal Space Program. Early on in the career mode, you need money to build new rockets, gather science, and develop new designs that take you further into space. Without early on tourists, you're sunk. They provide a lot of the hype and money so you can research/get to that next phase.
Real life is different, I get it. I doubt these celebrities paid much if anything. It's just rich people doing rich people stuff.
Yeah, low volume space tourism is fine. Bezos and such are funding quite a bit.
What I was getting at is the meme that “mass” space flight (much less interplanetary colonization) is in any way practical. It is not. It will not be, at least not until civilization is more along the lines of Orion's Arm or similar sci-fi. KSP is a fantastic illustration of that, as (even with a much smaller planet than Earth) one pays for every ounce that has to move in space.
Play Kerbal Space Program Realism Overhaul if you want a ... much closer to 'real' taste of how much more complicated and difficult an orbital flight is than a subortial flight, a lunar flight is than an orbital flight, an extraplanetary flight is than a lunar flight.
I'm not sure if it is still the unofficial motto of the mod... but it used to be 'if you cannot figure out how to install this mod, you will not be capable of playing it anyway', or something to that effect.
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Maybe we get to see a rocket full of billionaires go pop. That'd be neat.
🤞
First flight of an airplane: 1903 First landing on the Moon: 1969
67 years. Not even a single average lifetime.
I remember there being a newspaper interview with an old lady. She was a child and saw one of the wright brothers first flights. She then got to see man land on the moon, at the other end of her life.
66.5, even. Wright flyer flew in December, Eagle landed in July.
Technically correcter, therefore bester.
Both the "space" and "travel" parts of "space travel" are disputable there. It's not even "space tourism". I'll maybe give you "high altitude tourism". Space tourism, to me, implies spending an extended period in space, not a minute or two. That's barely enough time for a satisfying wank.
Awesome song about this that becomes increasingly more relevant every day:
I hear there's nuttin in space anyway
I mean it was never going to magically go from highly selective to anyone being able to go to space overnight. As time goes on and technology advances the "too much money" bar drops lower and lower.
Hopefully if society doesn't collapse, it might be feasible for an average person to do it as a once in a lifetime experience.
Human testing, obviously.
What about Strauss-Kahn who lost the french presidency election because he wanked in front an hotel employee ?
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