You should add the /s so they don’t think you’re being serious

For someone who spends all their time telling other people that they “missed the point” you’d think you’d be able to understand that my comment was addressed to you instead of Reddit in general and it did, in fact, make it’s way there.

As I said, this whole shitshow of a post is entirely your fault because you aren’t mature enough to hear criticism. Read my comment or don’t, it’s your choice whether you want to grow up or not.

This attitude is exactly why you are getting downvotes.

The manhole example is a back of the envelope assumption that it reached orbit and an assumption it actually stayed a manhole. No one is arguing whether an explosion has enough theoretical energy to move a hypothetical point-mass to a certain altitude, people are arguing that you are overestimating the strength of materials.

Even if you got a chunk of raw materials like steel or water into space and plan to intercept them with starship you still have huge problems. The first one is that you need to be able to dock with the payload if you plan to adjust it’s orbit, and you aren’t going to be able to dock with a fused reverse-meteor of steel. You actually need the structure to survive.

You are also going to have to circularize it’s orbit which is not as easy as you’d think. Your “manhole” example is one thing, but if you’ve played kerbal literally even once you’d know that going straight up is not a good way to get into orbit. You are going to have to angle your trajectory so that the relative speeds of your intercept are more similar than a straight vertical shot, and that is going to take way more explosive power. Add on top of that the fact that you’d have to travel sideways through the atmosphere if you want to Rendezvous in a single impulse and you need exponentially more explosive to overcome drag, plus more mass to protect from the atmosphere, which requires even more explosives.

And none of this even mentions the extreme difficulty of hitting your ideal trajectory in a single impulse with no way to error correct. Yeah it’s mathematically possible in a simulation, but you need to be able to adjust for error in the real world. Changes in the wind or air pressure at a certain altitude will have significant effects on your final altitude and position which will make to miss your intercept.

This tech would be much more useful on the moon sending water back to earth. There is no atmosphere to fight and your chances of making the Rendezvous are probably higher because you could circularize a bit using atmospheric braking. You’ve still got lots of other problems that make it difficult, like getting the nuclear material to the moon which is exactly why a spin launch installation on the moon makes way more sense, but whatever.

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You could launch a solid chunk of titanium to the altitude of the ISS, sure, but that isn’t a “working solution.” You need “machines” to be able to interact with the other spacecraft. You need to move able to adjust your trajectory. You need to be able to reuse your launch site and not destroy/irradiate it every time you launch. You need to be able to stop once you get to altitude, or you need to be able to somehow punch through the atmosphere and overcome the “I need more mass to block the atmosphere but that means I need more thrust but that means I need more reinforcement but that means I need more mass…” problem.

I think you are falling into that trap where you have a neat idea and then feel personally attacked by anyone who points out flaws. That’s not how you solve engineering challenges. Instead of arguing with the haters and insisting “trust me bro,” I encourage you to do the math. Get on kerbal and demonstrate an ISS rendezvous using a single impulse and a starship. I’d watch that video, for sure. Do some research on the g-force ratings for modern docking adapters and explain how they would be able to survive your hypothetical launch. You’ll get way better results than arguing “nuh ah” with people and then complaining about being downvoted.

I think you are just missing one important detail about Project Orion that would clear up you confusion: they theorized used a series of smaller nuclear explosions in order to continuously propel a spacecraft.

This video is a great visual example of the project, I highly recommend you watch it if you haven’t already. Honestly his whole channel is great.

We can make materials that can “withstand the ablation of a nuclear explosion,” but we can’t make materials that can withstand the force of any arbitrary explosion, nuclear or otherwise. We have to limit the size of the explosion to the material properties of our pressure plate and our spacecraft. There is an upper limit in terms of instantaneous G-forces that our constructions can withstand and that prevents us from just building a canon as you suggested (not to mention you would still have to do another burn once you are in space to actually circularize your orbit otherwise you’ll orbit once and hit the ground where you launched from lol).

Someone else mentioned Spin-launch in the comments and they are right. The whole point of spin-launch is to generate the kinetic energy and momentum you would have had to generate to get into space, but they are doing it over a longer period of time to protect the payload. Same concept with project Orion: they are distributing the total energy over many separate explosions so that the ship would actually be possible to build with real materials.

You know that “creativity” isn’t magic, right?