It's cool, very cool but looking at 1960s-1970s rocket tech I'd thought we'd be much further ahead by now. Especially when looking at a technological piece like the sr71 and the like.
We are? again, look at starship in 2024, it rides utop the super heavy booster, has a dedicated heat shield for atmospheric entry, and has successfully made it to space and even survived partway trough re-entry, IFT-4 will be in a few months and it’ll probably be the culmination of all the testing that happened over the past 5 years.
The most bonkers thing is they were testing that shit without simulations or computer models advanced enough to give them preliminary results. "Go fly this test plane with insanely powerful rockets that might kill you."
Yea all the R&D money went to computers which I don't think is a bad thing. In reality we really overstretched with Apollo with a little brute force. With more advanced computers we can do more, it just had to catch up. Look at the drones you can buy now for not that much money. That is all based on having better computers.
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u/Minimum-Ad-8056 Apr 27 '24
It's cool, very cool but looking at 1960s-1970s rocket tech I'd thought we'd be much further ahead by now. Especially when looking at a technological piece like the sr71 and the like.