'How Starship Will SQUASH Long Haul Aviation' : BUSTED!!
Added 2021-01-26 18:11:55 +0000 UTCTheres this very popular line of reasoning that ‘rockets are just like the planes of 100 years ago’, and that its ‘only a matter of time before rocket flight becomes routine’. However it falls apart the second you look at it in detail. Rockets have been around almost as long as planes. People were flying rockets to the moon at about the time jet travel was becoming mainstream.
The simple reality is rocket engines work under FAR harsher conditions than jet engines. You have to pump all the fuel (which makes up ~90% of the launch mass of the rocket) into the engines in a few minutes. This then accelerates the rocket up to about 20x the speed of sound. A plane will burn 1/10th the amount of fuel over 10 hours. This gives you some idea of how powerful the fuel pumps on rockets have to be! You then, if you want to land again, have to lose all that energy by rubbing against the atmosphere.
Even if you could crack the reliability problem, you still cannot dodge the fuel consumption problem that these rockets would burn about 10x more fossil fuel per passenger mile traveled than a plane would!
