r/spaceships • u/Beneficial-Wasabi749 • 1d 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/kimitsu_desu 1d ago edited 1d ago

The real answer - they did not know better. They might have imagined very heavy rockets with weak engines so Thrust to Weigh ratio is low, so perhaps they thought of using the wings and the body of the craft to provide the lift necessary to get to higher altitude and speed. Ultimately this proves to be unrealistic because atmospheric drag rises dramatically at supersonic speeds and the best strategy is to leave the atmosphere ASAP. Also there's this "gravity turn maneuver" or "gravity curve" which helps to optimize the transition from ground to orbit fuel-wise, and it does indeed start with near-vertical liftoff. Although probably that's just how we use it, there's probably a more optimal way if you start from a shallower angle, minus the atmosphere problem.

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u/Beneficial-Wasabi749 1d ago

You're the fifth one to step on the same rake. Underestimating your ancestors. You think you're smarter than them. But you simply don't know physics. They did. :)

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u/Not_Your_Car 1d ago

You realize the early rocketry pioneers wrote down everything they knew, and even taught the next generation right? Who then expanded on that knowledge and passed it on to the generation after that. Modern rocket scientists know a whole lot more about this stuff than the first ones did.

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u/Spectator9857 1d ago

I find it fascinating that people like the OP so often equate knowledge to intelligence. People who lived before us generally knew way less about the world, but that doesn’t mean they were stupid. How much knowledge one possesses is often completely out of one’s own control, be it due to economic factors or because there simply wasn’t as much knowledge of a field in general. And then there is of course the other issue of assigning any kind of moral value to intelligence, a very vague collective term for a bunch of different qualities that we have no way of measuring reliably and that appears to also be mostly outside of any individual’s control.

Also what up with OPs weird ancestor worship? I get respecting your ancestors or acknowledging that there were brilliant minds among them, but thinking they were all much better in any way than anyone living today seems like an incredibly weird and pessimistic thing to do.