space mission?

Question

why are we not useing a craft that can fly into orbit? ( like star trek ) other then a rocket from the ground. cant we just use rocket jets to get us out of the atmosfear once we get up to high? I dont understand why we havent made this jump. can someone tell me why. are we still so primitive that we cant come up with this yet?

Answer 1

star trek = science fiction

The "enterprise" would be HEAVY, and when I say heavy, I mean VERY HEAVY... And right now, a rocket can only send somethink like a ton or so each time it goes up...
The space station we're building right now requires more than 20 rockets to go in orbit to build it... an "enterprise" class spaceship would be 10 or 100 times heavier, and would therefore need 200 or 2000 rocket payload to build.... and we can only fire about 30 rockets each year (and here I mean all countries can make up to 30 rockets in total each year) which means we would need 30-50 years to build it... a time during which you would NOT be able to send anything else in orbit : no weather prediction satelites (aggriculture and fishing would suffer from it), no communication satellites (means no satelite phones in the moutains, not satelite TV...)


If you want to build that kind of spaceship, don't build it on earth, but directly in orbit, in 0G, with minerals collected from asteroids and fuel collected from gaz giants. But this would require a lot of equipement to be already in orbit and throughout the solar system.

Therefore : we're still very very far from there... (at least 2-5 hundred years)


Also, a "enterprise" class spaceship would STAY up there and never come down : or it wouldn't be able to go up again... (would need about half what the world had of oil to get back up... that is about as much as had been consumed in every car in the world since the invention of the combustion engine.)



now, if you want to send only a small ship, like for example a stargate's death glider or something about that big, then it still weighs about 1 ton... and that's the kind of maximum weight you can lift with a rocket: you need about 1000tons of fuel to lift it!!!!

However, there are some projects involving sending a spacecraft to space from the top of a carrier air craft (passenger transport converted beoing 747 like aircrafts). BUT you still have to use something like 100tons of fuel to finish the trip up to space... (and that kind of things is really dangerous!)

The idea is that we simply don't have a power source powerfull enough and light enough to get that kind of things up in space. Maybe nuclear fusion would be powerful enough... but even so, you'd have to find an efficient way of using that power and we don't have the technology either to create controled fusion or to use efficiently that kind of energy. (I even doubt it exists)

Answer 2

If you know a better way, please tell us. Better yet, start a company and make it happen. So far, the only way known is with rockets. People ARE working hard to look for better ways to get to space. Not everyone is sitting on their butt complaining on yahoo answers how other people should make things better.