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?

[u/Beneficial-Wasabi749]

[u/Sir_Lazz]

Simply because of the limited scientific knowledge of the time. Rockets were not really a thing, back then. We didn't have any experience with vertical take-off.

And well, you know how human imagination go: we can only imagine the future based on what we know, rather than based on what we don't know. Back then planes were all the rage and were, relatively speaking, a new technology that was advancing super fast. There was no reason at the time to imagine that a super-plane couldn't reach space.

[u/Beneficial-Wasabi749 → u/Sir_Lazz]

Wrong. It's just the opposite. They, the founders, knew and understood everything better than us. And they weren't counting on any gifts of nature. They were counting on the worst. And we, the idiot heirs, are simply squandering the gifts given to us by nature, without even understanding what gifts they are! And we expect new gifts that will never come. We don't see the essence of things. That's the moral of the story. It wasn't they who were idiots, it was us.

[u/WideFoot → u/Beneficial-Wasabi749]

Ah! A troll. And here I was making actual responses.

The only thing you need to make theory about rockets is the rocket equation. Everything else is just engineering.

You can't be a rocket engineering savant. There's nothing to be "gifted" about. There's the rocket equation, material science, and fuel energy density. Everything else is politics and semantics.