Cool Starship: Difference between revisions

== Real Life ==

* There is so far nothing in existence that can be called a true "spaceship", i.e, a space-equivalent of an oceangoing vessel, which could be loosely defined as a reusable space vehicle <ref>Oceangoing ships are reusable - they can be resupplied, and make the same trip several times, or travel to different destinations. A one-shot exploratory craft could be more accurately described as a probe, than a ship.</ref> capable of practically traversing interplanetary or at least cislunar distances,<ref>I.e, they're not limited to the harbor of Earth orbit.</ref> and not necessarily aerodynamic in any sense or designed to land anywhere.<ref>I.e, the vehicle stays in space, although it can deploy landers or shuttles to planetary/lunar surfaces - similar to ocean vessels, which never intentionally come ashore, but can carry small boats or hovercraft which do.</ref> And a true starship - a spaceship which can practically traverse the huge distances between stars - is much farther off. The International Space Station was built and space and stays in space, but it doesn't go anywhere, and even the Apollo command modules were one-shot non-reusable deals. So technically, this trope is not yet [[Truth in Television]]. That doesn't stop the following quasi-examples - unmanned probes, surface-to-orbit launch craft, and realistic proposed spaceships which we could (but have not yet) built - from being cool.

** The flaws have been overstated somewhat. And the other two manned spacecraft currently in use are [[Boring but Practical|disposable 3-man capsules]] with no cargo capacity to speak of - you can't really compare them to humanity's first [[Outlaw Star|grappler ship]]...

* The massive Saturn V rocket, with the Apollo capsule and lunar lander were awesome.