Unpopular Opinion

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Suborbital Supersonic transport will never become a viable reality (lemmy.ca)

submitted 4 months ago by Adderbox76@lemmy.ca to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was thinking this while watching the SpaceX flight get scrubbed for the third time in as many days.

I don't know if it was the stream I happened to be watching, but it was just a heavy heavy circle jerk about how part of the goal of Starship is to have "30 minutes" to anywhere on earth by going suborbital.

But it struck me that business relies on consistency. Flights leaving on time, arriving on time. If I have a conference in Hong Kong, am I going to wait three days for the perfect launch conditions because my sub-orbital flight launch is delayed by a bad cloud somewhere in the launch zone?

Until orbital and suborbital launches ae robust enough to happen like clockwork in ANY weather condition, it'll never be popular enough to be feasible.

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[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Why do we so desperately need to get anywhere in the world in 30 minutes? This would only ever be used for war or to satisfy the whimsy of billionaires and it is a fantasy to believe otherwise.

The capacity to expand a massive amount of fossil fuels to get anywhere in the world in 30 minutes sounds downright cataclysmic for the environment but also for a basic sense of one place feeling different than any other place. The entire world will turn into spacex rocket parking lots for billionaires rushing around laying waste to an irradiated landscape of identically repeating neofuedalist suburbs with no access to clean water.

Just because the rockets get more advanced doesn't mean it is progress....

The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth — when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass — the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another — particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

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[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

“If God had designed that His intelligent creatures should travel at the frightful rate of fifteen miles an hour by steam … He would have foretold it … The steam locomotive is a device of Satan to lead immortal souls down to hell"

[–] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Except a steam engine is a poor comparison since it is one of the most brilliant and efficient inventions ever. Most forms of energy generation (including nuclear power) are completely and utterly reliant on generating steam power.

You reduce my argument to silly nonsense when you conflate my scientifically sound concern over useless displays of masculinity disguised inside the carcass of space exploration dreams with being against any new form of technology just because it is unnatural and new and thus bad... which by the way is not what "Luddites" believed at all, the common understanding of the term does the same exact thing you just did to a much more nuanced viewpoint.