alt Hacker NewsKind of crazy to reduce the hardware on ship so much and move so much complexity to the ground. This can really only happen in a situation where anybody can throw out any dumb idea, because if you suggested this 20 years ago people would think you are an idiot.
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origini • yesterday at 9:53 PM
What do you mean? Reducing the complexity of the drive doesn't mean moving anything to ground?
Or do i miss something?
That's...the point. You can hire commercial welders to work on the ground side and build everything out once, cheaply.
The issue with the shuttle era was that they needed huge teams of specialized technicians to refurbish the insanely complex orbiter after every mission.
If we ever get sufficiently improved materials science for heat shields and engines there's still always a possibility of returning to the SSTO space plane concept. That would allow a more austere launch and recovery environment, but given current limitations this is the local maxima.