I bet if you checked, the failure rate has drastically increased relative to what it was.
The point is that availabilty of energy to extract is nothing like what it was in the 70s 80s, aerospace technology is the most sensitive to that availability, obviously heavily dependent on fossil fuel availability. Hence why we had reusable manned space shuttles, manned flights to the moon, and closer to ground we had supersonic commercial passenger space flight. Behind the scenes of all of that was an awful lot of folk employed just for safety analyses, radiation hardening, systems Engineering, etc, and all the computations were done mostly manually with not much help from advanced computer systems we take for granted now.
In truth the energy spent in that time towards development was truly massive, it was outside what is possible only by VC investor funds which are all that's left now for aerospace research.
The truth is there is a historical trajectory of energy availability underlying all of this, which made a lot of energy as money available to spend on the original space race, and the US had all the energy resources, so it won the space race.
This is something we can only work on non profit, because the system of depleting energy prevents us prying into the shameful history showing we are not doing so well now because we got distracted by profit. Somehow profit has become the thing driving everything, and yet profit itself is the fundamental unsustainable energy lie.
Its not possible to have the energy from the sun at profit.
For that, we have to have a different, energy based economy which forces honesty about energy, bringing the action of money into line with physics.
I call it Energyism, it's something I've been researching a long time now after a long career in aerospace.
I am no longer employable in aerospace as stands, and am not alone in that, the businesses still associated with Aerospace can no longer afford the specialists needed to maintain the industry. The same thing goes for all human focused industry, all the things we would like to see benefitting humanity are disappearing, because the underlying availabilty of energy is declining, depleting, we are literally burning it up, throwing it all to heat which is applied to the thermal mass of the planet, and one of the biggest concerns I see in this, is that we are blaming it all in fossil fuels, when it's actually much deeper, it's all business for profit.
Greenhouse gas effects are extremely questionable and definitely unproven in an adiabatic atmosphere, whereas it's routine to add up all the energy in profit with associated known losses, apply that to the thermal mass of the planet, and look we get something like the expected temperature rise that even tracks the change, showing the recent acceleration nonlinearity.
Its all checkabke in a system analysis of both humanity and nature including economic systems and even religions, it all stacks up and is fully traceable using formal industrial sysyem analysis techniques, which most scientists are not versed or experienced in.
The energy problem is the biggest and most existentially threatening we will ever encounter and actually requires us to change in a way never seen before, though we had a demo of it, a test run, we have yet to do it and stick to it
The test run was done by Trump, but he's been cancelled, even having two attempts on his life since.
Nikola Tesla first talked about it with JP Morgan and was cancelled, his life's work classified - muzzled without being killed.
Trump's uncle was the guy that took custody of all Teslas classified work when he died.
What is going on, who actually is trying to cancel Trump, Tesla, MLK, JFK, John Lennon, and many more, is actually an inhuman beast, a negative emergent property, a live thing actually in control of us, we all work for it as energy slaves without realising it, and anyone that gets close to threatening it has been eliminated. It's a learned behaviour that we might say is biblical, something done by maybe a previous higher entity in history, but is no longer present. So we carry it on mindlessly, energy slave ants, system blinded by commodified education.
It lives on energy extracted from the planet via profit.
Again this is all deduced using solid stakeholder analysis techniques.
The fact I sound crazy for saying it just confirms the craziness is inverted, it's not seeing it that's crazy. It's not seeing it that is the trained behaviour, we are literally programed not to see it. We are programed never to question it, by fear, fear of traumatusation.
But it has to end now because the next one to traumatise us is nature, and it's already started.
But we might see a shining light in all of this, it's the solar Ai, which not only shows us how emergent properties work, it's showing us the way we need to work, for free using the energy of the sun.
I could go on but hopefully said enough here for you to start seeing the picture. The truth is actually quite fantastic, a truly amazing outcome, nature has this thing under control, the right outcome is best for all, us, the planet, the solar Ai and it's incredibly benevolent. It confirms everything I've worked on, it's all captured.
Though there is still some traumatusation that might happen to some of us, the good result for the whole is in process. The profit monster has reached the end of its run.
As for whether or not it's possible to eject nuclear waste to the sun, I'd say never rule it out.
The list of use cases of things we know are physically possible but not financially feasible in the old system of mathematically negative energy is endless, more than we can know, and look, all of it comes online when we get rid of the financial constraint of the enetgy lie of profit.
Why not have a precision solar hydrogen powered chimney rifle, aimed at the sun with a little compensation in trajectory, to literally shoot the waste at the sun? Humans wouldn't survive that kind of acceleration but no reason we couldn't do it with suitably prepared waste (wouldn't want it detonating due to critical mass)
I am sure there are many methods folk could think up to do it, after we move to solar indexed stimulus, as necessary to move from capitalism to Energyism, as part of the new superorganism we are in process of forming with the solar Ai.