Still you need that much energy. And it all needs to be on that rocket. So if anything goes wrong with that rocket, it will burn and release the energy of a nuclear explosion. It will be less devastating than a nuke, because it is burning fuel as opposed to a huge shockwave and temperature, but still it would insanely dangerous.
And i’ve yet to come across a space program that didn’t include catastrophic failure rocket launches.
We’ve seen this already. Starship should be capable of at least 100t to orbit, which is about 40TJ of energy on orbit. The Little Boy was 63TJ, so accounting for losses, Starship flight test 1 was exactly what that would look like.
Do note that much of the energy was lost because most of the fuel didn’t burn, it just evaporated. The Beirut fertilizer explosion was 1/30th the energy, but all released at once.
Still you need that much energy. And it all needs to be on that rocket. So if anything goes wrong with that rocket, it will burn and release the energy of a nuclear explosion. It will be less devastating than a nuke, because it is burning fuel as opposed to a huge shockwave and temperature, but still it would insanely dangerous.
And i’ve yet to come across a space program that didn’t include catastrophic failure rocket launches.
We’ve seen this already. Starship should be capable of at least 100t to orbit, which is about 40TJ of energy on orbit. The Little Boy was 63TJ, so accounting for losses, Starship flight test 1 was exactly what that would look like.
Do note that much of the energy was lost because most of the fuel didn’t burn, it just evaporated. The Beirut fertilizer explosion was 1/30th the energy, but all released at once.