General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The Bezos Sub-Orbital Flight Is Just an Uber Expensive E-Ticket Theme Park Ride. [View all]Silent3
(15,432 posts)...is the cost (both financial and environmental) of creating that fuel.
Hydrogen fuel is, after all, just an energy transport mechanism for us, not an energy source, not having a lot of free hydrogen on this planet. But if there's a really cheap clean energy source in our future, even if it's big and bulky and earth-bound, that source could be used to turn water into very cheap hydrogen and oxygen for traditional rocket fuel.
At any rate, it's not a denial of physics to simply allow for the fact that there will almost certainly be future technology that neither of us can imagine right now.
It's never good to be such a technological optimist that you're depending on unknown future technology to make things better. But I'm not making any decisions now that depend on any of this. I'm just saying it's not smart to rule out things we can't fully imagine yet.
The future (if we don't fuck up the planet so much we collapse civilization -- possibly a big "if" is almost certainly going to have a lot of amazing technology we can't imagine now, even some we might not grasp the basic principles of yet.