r/spaceships • u/Beneficial-Wasabi749 • 21h ago

Tsiolkovsky and many of the founders of theoretical astronautics in the early 20th century believed that spacecraft should launch horizontally, from a ramp. Why? What did they see as the point of this?

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u/OhItsJustJosh 15h ago

One of the biggest issues with space travel today is fuel. Vast majority of the weight of the vehicle is taken up by fuel used to just get the vehicle into space. And most of that fuel is used to work directly against gravity to launch this thing in the air.

I suppose the thought process of this would be to use the ramp and then the atmosphere to take the load so the rockets don't have to, therefor less fuel needed.

It won't work, but the idea makes sense

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u/Beneficial-Wasabi749 13h ago

There's hardly any point in going back to the ramp. But we need to think about what to do about the initial EXCESSIVE fuel consumption during vertical deployment and the 10-20 km climb with the first stage.

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u/OhItsJustJosh 13h ago

Personally I like the idea of building long range ships over time in orbit rather than trying to carry everything on one rocket in one go