A good rocket ship is more expensive than it’s ever been. This isn’t just because of inflation. Back in the 60s, rocket science was relatively primitive, and you could get away with using cheaper materials and shittier construction standards. Now, for safety and other reasons, the modern rocketeer demands something with more comfort. More breathing room. And more cost.
The average rocket manager is going to respond to this by throwing a stapler at the head of the person asking them for more money. I didn’t get into rocket science to spend my father’s money, they’ll exclaim, before taking an early lunch at the gentlemen’s club and playing two rounds of golf down at the private course. These competing sets of demands will place you, the rocket scientist, in an awkward position.
On the one hand, you want to not burn some astronauts alive. We only have a few of these folks, and lowering the standards for astronaut admission are just going to mean that things on the space station fall apart that much faster. And on the other hand, you want to be able to afford to finish the rocket, otherwise those astronauts are gonna need to hoof it, and it’s really tiring walking all the way to the moon in those crazy moon boots. You need to look for cost-reduction options, and in a lot of cases, that means outsourcing the whole thing to private companies, who can somehow (through the magic of writing shitty contracts) deliver rocket ships cheaper and faster.
Here’s how we do it, here at Seat Safety Switch Space Shooting Solutions. We take a freshly-decommissioned Greyhound bus, and we put the biggest rocket engine we can find on it. Of course, there’s lots of problems with this basic proposal. There’s a lot of air holes on a Greyhound bus, which we seal up with Home Depot’s most affordable bathroom caulk. Sometimes we steal the expired tubes out of the dumpster behind the store, and warm them up in the microwave to get them to flow again. The bus itself doesn’t hold up well to the heat of atmospheric re-entry, which is why we also wrap it in some dense layers of aluminum sheeting. And the bus doesn’t have seatbelts, which we solved by welding in some straps and asking the astronauts to bring their own rope from home. What, you can’t tie a knot? And we let you go into orbit?
