>>12188270Piece of literal shit that would have never worked, every single piece of technology required to even let it make orbit was falling far short of minimum performance requirements before the thing was finally put out of its misery.
Venture Star NEEDED the carbon fiber composite tanks because if they built it out of Al-Li using the lightest construction methods they had it would still be too heavy; the only way to shave off more weight was to imagine the ability to create carbon composite tanks with the same amount of joinery mass as a metal tank, which is impossible.
Venture Star NEEDED the super high performance aerospikes to work, because it needed both high thrust to weight ratio propulsion AND very high Isp. The problem is, the smaller engine they built to work out the specifics in the aerospike design ended up being very over weight, very under powered, and not nearly as efficient as they'd hoped. Jesus Christ man, they had baseline assumed that the main engine they were going to develop was going to be more efficient and higher thrust than the RS-25, while also being lighter than it, but chances are the opposite would have been true of the thing in all three categories.
Combine these two already program-killing flaws with the fact that the Venture Star design itself was ass-heavy and difficult to control during all phases of reentry and glide to landing, and you have a recipe for an even worse boondoggle waste of time and money program than Shuttle. The fact that ANYONE thought that Venture Star made any sense is just more evidence to the fact that people are unable to think if they are convinced something is cool.
