As you recall, that year the Wrights first demonstrated to the world what was then the best plane in existence, their improved Fliers. Within just a couple of years they were badly out of date as aviation progressed by leaps and bounds. Orville himself lived to read about great swarms of bombers firebombing entire cities, and a couple dropping atomic devices. In 1958 the first near sonic jets, 707s able to carry 150 passengers across entire continents and oceans, were entering service. So was the F-104 Starfighter able to exceed Mach 2 and down its enemies with guided missiles.
Why did humanned aviation go from pretty much useless wood, fabric and wire crates to high performance, metallic machines able to generate large revenues from average citizens in just fifty years, while humanned space flight has gone from throwaway each flight R-7s to barely improved R-7s that still cost millions to put a given fellow in space over the same time span?
Partly it's a matter of fuel. The coach fare from Los Angeles to Tokyo is a reasonably affordable $1000 or even less. Part of the cost of the fuel, which amounts to about 70 gallons burned per passenger -- less than driving a car the same distance. Pushing a big plane through the thin air a few miles up, largely horizontally at nearly the speed of sound, does not require all that much work, so the cost is within bounds.
Accelerating a few persons a couple of hundred miles upward to orbital velocity of 18,000 miles per hour is a far more arduous task that demands tremendous quantities of fuel. Some 10,000 gallons per astronaut. No middle class person can afford the gas. That fact will never change; even if future spacecraft can take off from runways they will gobble fuel like pigs at the trough. It's the Laws of Physics.
Consider that no one has managed to produce a commercially viable supersonic airliner. Pushing a plane at just twice the speed of sound consumes so much fuel per passenger that only the elites can afford it, and there are not enough of them to justify developing such machines. If getting from Paris to New York is not economically viable, then just how is orbiting the planet much less visiting deep space going to work financially wise?
Then there is the cost of the plane versus the rocket. Developing a subsonic airliner or a spaceship costs billions. But because first are fairly cheap to operate and provide the extremely useful service of transporting the masses and cargo hither and yon for purposes of business and leisure at reasonable cost, lots of copies can be manufactured, spreading out the cost over hundreds or thousands of units that can then generate revenue that more than pays for the development of the airliner. Because there is not much demand for space flights that will always cost too much for all but a few wealthy elites willing to pay out of their pockets to put their lives on the line each machine costs enormous up front sums that can never be paid back in commercial revenues. The costs are so high that it does not make all the much difference if the machines are disposable or recoverable; they are way too expensive either way -- that's why the shuttles failed cost wise.
And let's not forget the cost of insuring the precious but super risky spaceships and the humans they contain.
In their enthusiasm space enthusiasts often lie to try to get the rest of us to go along with their dreams. Here's an example. You see, back in the days of Columbus and so forth sail driven cargo ships were the high-end travel technology of their day. Sort of like the space shuttle is these days. Since they found it worthwhile to sail on months long voyages of exploration, we should be building space ships to do the same thing. If we don't we're a bunch of small thinking wimps.
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