I've seen a lot of rockets over the years, and some stick out because they look awful, and that's not an easy thing to do when the laws of physics demands clean aerodynamic lines and and constrains your aesthetics.
You ever seen someone put together a manned rover lab, drills, and ISRU, with XL wheels and a rocket on the back all as a single payload not covered with an airfoil? That was my first successful lunar rover/base system and it looked hideous.
"Assemble a team of aesthetically challenged engineers and have them fight against the natural tendency of a rocket to look cool" Best Scott Manley quote going so far
Why isn't New Shepard on that list? It can't be for just orbital class rockets as Dr Goddard's rocket was on that list...even though I don't think it should have been number one.
DO NOT DESTROY ZE ROCKET, IT IS SUPPOSED TO HIT FOREIGN COUTRIES AND IT SHALL DO THIZ! Or the German was like "No, not ze DATA, i need them!, destroying it now is not efficient!"
The triple solid rocket booster design looks like the kind of thing you get when you are spacing your boosters in KSP to ensure they have snapped to the separators rather than the core tank.
"If you want to churn out an ugly launch vehicle you have to actually assemble an entire team of aesthetically challenged engineers and have them fight against the natural tendency for rockets to look cool." There is definitely some Lord Pratchett in this man.
The sort of thing you'd get when you spend 3 hours designing the perfect landing craft and then realize you don't have nuclear engines unlocked for that Moho mission.
To give a perspective on how many aerospace students actually watch scott manley. I (an aerospace student) recently used a scott manley video as a reference in an assignment. When my group member saw that I used him as a reference, not only did they not object but everyone agreed that it was probably the best reference in the entire assignment.
It's New Mexico trying to prove its the superior Mexico XD (seeing as it launched out of white sands I feel this qualifies!) Also I'm a New Mexican so I can say that.
Seriously ... My old man used to work for NASA (Marshal Space Flight Center) and he joked that the American rockets and space hardware look like the White House and the Russian rockets and Hardware look like the Kremlin. And Bezos I guess needs something to keep the GF happy.
A big part of why Ariane was so bizarre looking was that it was French. While I don't normally engage in stereotypes, anything in France that costs a lot of money or involves the government *absolutely must* be so uniquely Gallic as to remove any possibility that it might be mistaken for (or accused of benefiting from) any other country's handiwork or insight. During the Gaullist period, the French went out of their way to ensure that basically every aspect of their manufacturing process (military and civilian) was incompatible with British, German and American systems. They neither wished nor intended for any of it to be useful outside of France or her colonies. The consequences to this policy were obvious and manifold (and remain obvious to anybody who's ever driven a Peugeot prior to around 2003), but it has been an article of pride in French manufacturing for over a century that "the French copy no-one, and no-one copies the French."
Alternatively, engineers who were told to design the rockets and make them look good, and they took umbridge at having to waste time on "pointless aesthetics" so they made their design look as ugly as possible as a "fuck you" to management.
Scott: Talks about the SRB-X's awkward gap between boosters. Me: Looks at half a dozen similar rocket designs of my own in KSP. "In my defense, they worked."
@Had Tobe what does that even mean? How can something be semi-flat? Are you just being facetious about it being an oblate spheroid? Would semi-flat be like a cylinder?
@Had Tobe Ok how does the earth orbiting the sun working in a way that half the world can be in darkness while the other side has light and for that matter how can the moon be seen from basically anywhere and also how do you explain hundreds of thousands of hundred thousands of pictures of the earth having a obvious curvature also how would people be able to circumnavigate the world. Or how gravity works. OR HOW IT CAN MAKE SENSE TO A HUMAN BEING THAT EARTH IS FLAT WHILE ALL OTHER PLANETS AREN’T. OR HOW NO NASA EMPLOYEE WOULD HAVE COME OUT AND SPOKEN ABOUT HOW EVERYONE HAS BEEN LIED TO FOR CENTURIES. Jesus Christ we humans are doomed if people like you really exist
@Had Tobe I never said I was right about the earth being round, I just asked for evidence about how anything that we know would work. Also so you are going to wait like a year or two and spend the millions of dollars that it’s probably gonna take to buy a starship ticket, just to find out that you ARE WRONG?
Hi Scott--The structure of the early Atlas vehicles had a weakness in the upper end of the LOX tank. The Able upper stage(s) put LARGE bending loads on the upper end of the Atlas due to the distance between the Able stage CP and the attach point to the Atlas. It was pretty well doomed to failure from the outset.
Scott, you continue to amaze me with your depth of knowledge on orbital mechanics, propulsion systems and space in general. Us space geeks thirsty for knowledge are lucky to have you at our fingertips on you tube. Love all your videos. Keep on keeping on.
Your helicopter joke reminded me of an old friend who'd been in the army - he described the Chinook as 10,000 nuts and bolts flying in close formation.
@@milantrcka121 Just keep the "Jesus Nut" tight, you'll be ok. The Bell 47 is beautiful and the most helicoptery helicopter. Just sitting on a bench out in mid air, no doors. You can feel yourself hanging from that rotor.
I'm pretty certain of this but its been years since I read this book, so don't hold me to it. In the introduction (by Neil Armstrong) to the book "Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon" there's a story about each author (Shepard & Slayton). The one about Slayton was from his test pilot days. I pretty sure it was the Republic F-105 Thunderchief and Deke nearly lost one in a spin test. He was told to bail out but didn't because he still had a lot of altitude. He worked the problem and eventually recovered the plane. After it landed and after he got out the ground crew opened up the bomb bad doors and they said 1000's of rivets and other small bits of metal just fell on the ground. You know that scene in the Blues Brothers when they get out of the car and it just falls apart - yup like that. So the Chinook's not the only case of bits of metal flying in close formation.
@@blackace7782 One of the other jokes fixed wing guys have about choppers. _There's 2 kinds of chopper - ridiculously expensive and idiotically expensive._
The Atlas: An oversized delivery system for horse tranquilizers The Ariane: I'd never call it ugly The proton: is like something straight out of flash gordon, I actually love it. It's successors demand I take mind bleach. The OTRAG..... I wish there was a time machine to prevent its conception. The scud thing: ugly, the wings save it from being horrid. The conastoga 1620: Scud thing without the wings, looks like a bunch of crayons taped on a sex toy The Aries X-1: "have you seen a buttplug fly?" The SRB-x: social distancing The Jupiter 3: "We need more struts" The navajo cruise missile: flash gordon aesthetic, could easily see it in movie. Me likey a lot. The V-2 hermes: "Kill.....meeeeee" The Goddard prototype: "I did a school project and coined it as a serious science project"
@@fl00fydragon just report him for spam. Poor misguided soul (or troll, don't really care) replies to every comment on this video with the same copy-paste bs
Scott said it looked like someone abused Shuttle leftovers to lift Apollo leftovers into space, or something like that. I think it looks like a mishmash of American space history trying to yeet half a Hindenburg straight into the sun. 09:33
Best quote ever: "aesthetically challenged engineers" I just thought about some people at work and had to laught way too hard! Thanks Scott you made my day!
Ohhh, wow. Jupiter 3 looks cool as hell, what are you on about? Now, that's recycling! The diversity of shapes, sizes and tech! The symmetry! I'm in love.
To me, the space shuttle itself was the most ridiculous design ever conceived. A bulky, plane-like orbiter riding a giant orange fuel tank into space like a witch on a broomstick.
@@LolTollhurst It's only because it holds the highest number of people in a crew, capsules only hold 3 people while the space shuttle can have a crew of 7 people
@@theseductivepotato7459 if you mean, almost evey launch had or made problems such as dropping foam into the wing, engines not working, thermal protection tiles falling, SRB's heating a Hydrogen tank, no escape tower (that would have saved the challenger). And so on and on.....
Thank you Scott for making another great video. I'd have a suggestion for next one. Can you make detailed video about Soyuz launches and rendezvous with ISS and how come they manage to do it in 6 hrs and in their last flight (Oct 14, 2020) in just 3 hrs compared to the original which took 2 days. Thanks and I can't wait to see more fantastic videos 😀
Is that Ariane the most Kerbal looking rocket ever? 2 strap on liquid boosters and 2 strap on solid boosters. Actually it looks like a lot of the ones I've built in KSP, go for it ESA!
It was to test the tanks. Couldn't use real fuel or oxidiser as hypergolics are really nasty. Too cold to use water because of risk of it freezing. Solution, use industrial quantities of vodka!
V-2 engineers frequently got drunk on the V-2's 75% ethanol. Not very often people get drunk from drinking rocket fuel. But hey, when you need a drink, you need a drink.
I'm sorry dude, but you called some of the coolest rockets ugly! The thing I like most about your channel is that you usually find some very obscure facts or tech that I'd never heard of, and in this episode you shine a light on possibly THE coolest heavy lift launch vehicle I've ever seen in the Jupiter series SDLV! EPIC!
It must be the thousands of hours I've spent in KSP but quite a few of these look pretty good to me. The OTRAG reminded me of my BOB series (Big Orange Box).
I've built a couple of these in KSP. It's also good to know that I have the same rocket building strategy as soviet russia did, as in just strap more shit to it until it gets there.
Scott just a thank you you make complex subjects interesting and entertaining. You have a comprehensive grasp of the subject but never let it become of look how clever I am. Keep it up.
@@Shadow_The_Pad I live in Ireland, for us it's like saying Physic instead of Physics. Or mathematic. Just wrong. To be fair though, Scott's lived in the US for quite a while, he's put up a good fight.
7:04 The Ares is quite an interesting rocket to me, I saw its launch way back when I was just getting into rocketry, and to me, it was the coolest looking launch vehicle to ever exist. It's still pretty darn awesome to me even to this day, though my taste in rocket aesthetics has drawn me toward the old Atlas missiles and other rockets of its era.
7:16 "This has the effect of making it resemble a *stick* that has consumed a substantial meal, and is going to spend the next week digesting it!" 🤣🤣 Epic roast!
I like your «check your staging» t-shirt. And, combining that with this episode, here's my take : In KSP, I made an asparagus type rocket that mixed solid boosters and liquid fuel. The 4 solid boosters where attached to the second and third pair of liquid fuel boosters. The staging was SUPPOSED to be : Liquid fuel pair #1, the 4 solid boosters, pair #2, pair #3, second stage. Instead, I got : Pairs #2 and 3, second stage, solid boosters, pain #1 ! Launch. Pair #1 burn out. Stage. Pairs #2 and 3 at full power and still attached to burning solid boosters, separate and collide with the main body. Unplanned rapid disassembly and massive explosion.
i think the earlier version of the proton head look weird as if it's missing plating....tho i guess the tip should be more thermally insulated so i guess it could warranted to look different.
Yup, I've always found proton launches some of the prettiest out there! I actually find the original R-7 design much uglier due to how squat it was. The Soyuz at least makes up for that though nowadays by having tall slender upper stages
Unpopular opinion: The Space Shuttle. I know it's historic and important and it achieved a lot. But honestly: Off-center rockets look bad. Rockets that have to permanently waste thrust to not tip over, look bad. Doesn't mater, whether it's an Atlas 5 with only one srb, or the Space Shuttle. I'll go even further. SLS is what the Space Shuttle should have looked like.
Never liked the Shuttle's look. And once they found out it cost too much to refit to make recycling a good idea they should have gone to something else then.
Not only is it ugly, but it was so poorly designed it lead to the deaths of 14 astronauts. I am very disappointed that Scott didn't include this monstrosity. Design by committee at it's worst.
You should see my KSP builds. Every thing you dislike about those rockets is incorporated into each one of my designs. Even more horrifically, my planes feature these terrible design choices even more...
