Is Elon Musk's "Starship" going to keep blowing up?
This isn't a rhetorical question. I'm actually not sure what the answer is. I suspect Elon isn't either, actually, in this particular case.
You see, he's building a rocket twice as big as any ever built before. So, to some extent, this is uncharted territory. Elon doesn't really know, and can't really know, whether what he's trying to do is really practical or not. It's perfectly possible that the limits of this particular technology -- liquid fueled rockets of the type perfected by Werner von Braun in the early 1940's for the Nazis -- have been exceeded, and this big a rocket cannot, and never will be practical. Or, it may be that this is just a glitch, or a kink, that can be worked out, in time.
Personally, I rather hope it keeps blowing up. The technology is inherently limited. Once we accept this fact -- that liquid fueled rockets are not humanity's future -- we can move on. Probably to nuclear powered rockets.
Personally, I think we should give Project Orion another try.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Little A-bombs and H-bombs could almost certainly be used to power spacecraft in deep space. Now, of course, these nuclear explosives are still very expensive. But, surely, if the government monopoly on nuclear explosives were broken, and we let the "magic of the marketplace" apply, these costs could be dramatically reduced. All we need to do, is let entrepreneurs like Elon Musk mass produce H-bombs, and we could probably build real starships! And, after all, Elon's only stoned on meth about half the time, so, what could possibly go wrong? This is the true future of humanity!
It's like Albert Einstein said: "When you ask simple questions, and answers are also simple, you know you hear God thinking."
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