Your username checks out. I would just like to go ahead and remind that the US is a country of immigrants — people that left behind their old worlds to come build a new, better one. It’s the same spirit that’s driving and has driven US space innovation. Clamping together a rocket is pretty easy. Imagining it isn’t.

Your heart is in the right place. Too right perhaps. It’s easy to forget the kind of kindness that’s possible in the United States isn’t everywhere else.

In the Tintin comic, “Destination Moon,” they do exactly this. The rocket is nuclear powered, maintains 1g acceleration until the halfway point where they flip and decelerate. Takes them only a few hours.

My first car: a beater I bought for $1500, sold for $1700. My second car: bought from an old man’s estate sale for $8500, sold after driving it to death for $9200. I now ride a brand new motorcycle I bought for $6500, fill up for $11 every two weeks, and we just bought my partner a newer SUV. I’ve been driving for 14 years. Point is, you gotta learn to crawl before you can walk.

Douglas tires are cheap and good. Off brand tires that are cheap may not be good. There’s a lot to tires such as temperature and elasticity. Read reviews before you buy. Lots of 4.5 star reviews? Buy.

Devil’s advocate here but I see OPs point. There’s higher res images from mars. There’s absolutely no argument for such low quality images in this day and age, save for the IR or navigation camera bit. Even still, I do not believe documenting this could have less precedence than a simple vehicle test. This is the Apollo 8 of Orion.

Source: I have a digital imaging degree and a degree in aerospace