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We will be talking about this milestone (first reusable space rockets) the same way my parents talked about first step on the moon.

danbruc 11y ago
Nope. I don't want to diminish this great technological achievement in any way but this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. Actually I am not even sure that setting foot on Mars will top the Moon, in some sense it's the same thing. And yes, I am aware of the huge difference between Moon and Mars. The first permanent human outpost, whether on the Moon, on Mars or elsewhere, may be the next step after going to the Moon and living in space stations that doesn't have the feel of an incremental step.
- pilsetnieks 11y ago
  I agree that this isn't a Moon-landing scale event, it could be more similar to the first Apollo launch, or maybe the first Space Shuttle launch. This isn't so impressive in itself as it is in what it enables for the future. However, I would disagree that Mars is just more of the same as was the Moon landing. It would be not unlike saying that because Columbus went to America, later discoveries weren't so impressive.
  - danbruc 11y ago
    I see this in a slightly different way. I consider (mass)producing chips with billions of transistors, building 200 meter high skyscrapers and similar things as impressive achievements even though they are kind of routine at this point. But they are no longer doing something for the first time and I think doing something for the first time is an important part of what makes an impressive event a really outstanding one. And at least for me right now going to Mars seems not sufficiently different from going to the Moon to have the feel of a first but that is surly very subjective.
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  It is the clearest milestone of a new era - in a way the moon landings and shuttle turned out not to be - space travel where the main expense is fuel.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    The next one will be the first reusable flight with a booster.
- omni 11y ago
  > this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. You're right, this landing is a much bigger deal long-term. The Apollo program proved that one of the world superpowers, with a decades-long presidential mandate and a giant, massive bucket of funding, could do incredible things.[1] It was awesome, and it's clearly one of the defining moments in human history. However, the pace of space travel actually decreased after the Apollo program.[2] This probably had something to do with the fact that nobody wanted to spend untold billions of dollars to keep doing this stuff. The Moon landing was a big deal, but it was a one-off big deal. It didn't have world-changing impacts on the future, only on the moment. The whole Mars objective of SpaceX probably isn't going to be their lasting contribution to humanity. All their technological achievements so far pale in comparison to how hard it will be to live on Mars. They may well fail. However, the reusability improvements they are making have significant potential to increase the rate of space flight for the rest of our existence. That's a gift-that-keeps-on-giving big deal, and enables all sorts of options that were prohibitively expensive before. We're all really hoping the graph in [2] starts spiking up soon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbital_launch_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbita...
  - sigmar 11y ago
    >The Moon landing was a big deal, but it was a one-off big deal. It didn't have world-changing impacts on the future, only on the moment. I very much agree with this sentiment and your other points. I think the comment you are replying to is thinking about this achievement in a 20th century frame-of-reference[1], and not considering the tremendous amount of potential cheaper space travel has. [1] By this I mean that he is thinking of space exploration nothing more than an inspirational endeavour.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > decades-long presidential mandate A small note to put things into perspective: moon landing happened only 12 (!) years after Sputnik. It happened only 8 (!) years after Kennedy's speech and Gagarin's first space walk. The first launch of actual Apollo equipment was 3.5 years before the manned landing. In other words: humans went from launching the first satellite to putting people on the Moon in 12 years. In 8 years from first person in space to first person on the Moon. That's the speed of focused progress. Something we very much lack these days.
- sigmar 11y ago
  >this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. I strongly disagree. Landing on the moon provides evidence that humanity is technologically capable of space travel. More or less a proof of concept. But markedly reducing the cost of going into outer space means that humanity now has access to space tourism and whatever future benefits space brings. No one knows about the first digital computers in the 1940s. The general public sees the computer revolution as happening in the 80s and 90s, because that is when computers were made available to consumers.
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  I agree. Fifty years since we stepped on the moon, and we're just now re-using rockets? It's a great accomplishment, no doubt. Many congratulations to all involved. But this should have been done in the 1970s. The same economic drivers that lead us to do it today were still there back in the day. What happened is that we lost sight of the economics of space travel -- if we ever had our eye on them in the first place. We chased a rabbit down the wrong hole. Political systems exist and thrive for political reasons. NASA was always going to be about bringing home the bacon to defense contractors and looking good for the current administration. Elon is stuck with an economics/efficiency goal: make it both safe and cheap. Just to be clear, my comment has nothing to do with the great folks at Space-X. I'm a huge fan. My point is that they're just continuing the natural evolution of spaceflight. But in the big picture, it's an incremental achievement (and yep, I know how difficult it was. All of this stuff is difficult.) The next big goal is probably regularly-scheduled private manned spaceflights. And no, I don't mean sub-orbital fun rides. More like week-long tourist trips to the space station or a moon base. This would indicate that 1) access to space is truly becoming relatively cheap and reliable, and 2) there's actually somewhere to go. Historic things are things we do for the first time, sure. Re-landing a rocket qualifies, but it is much in the category of orbital-docking: necessary but a footnote. Anybody remember the first manned space mission that did docking? How about that remembering the first one to leave Earth orbit? Space fans like me would know. But not in the history books for the general public. Note that the question was about how historically important this is. Not how critical it is to spaceflight, or any other qualifier. It can be stupendously important in terms of the technical details, yet have very little value historically.
- autokad 11y ago
  moon and mars basically the same thing? O_O the radiation earth||mars and earth||moon are quite different in both duration and intensity. I believe its something they really haven't figured out. speaking of duration, that's a big deal in both fuel and effect on human passengers. but lets get to the important stuff, mars is actually a planet, with an atmosphere. saying the two are equivalent is more or less saying kicking a field goal outside on a windy day is the same as kicking one in a dome. except when you miss everyone dies. you also need 5x escape velocity from mars (we want them to come back too), which means more fuel and landing with lots of fuel. or at the very least sending fuel prior and hope nothing happens to it.
  - DiThi 11y ago
    It's very likely that methane engines will be used. Methane will be easy to make in mars and it's much more dense than hydrogen. Also terraforming mars will probably involve dumping methane into the atmosphere.
  - throwaway5752 11y ago
    The Moon landing in the context of science and technologies available in the mid- to late-60's was an absolutely monumental human achievement that won't soon be equaled. It was just 66 years after the Wright brothers! ps - I think the landing yesterday was a pretty sizable achievement.
ForHackernews 11y ago
Shuttle booster rockets were already reusable.
- timdiggerm 11y ago
  Only sorta barely https://www.quora.com/Space-Shuttle-How-much-money-was-saved-by-reusing-the-Solid-Rocket-Boosters-SRBs-instead-of-making-them-disposable https://www.quora.com/Space-Shuttle-How-much-money-was-saved...
- JshWright 11y ago
  They were also basically empty metal tubes that solid fuel was packed into. But perhaps more relevant to point, the shuttle itself was "reusable". It remains to be seen if SpaceX can reuse rockets in a more cost effective way than the shuttle.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    > It remains to be seen if SpaceX can reuse rockets in a more cost effective way than the shuttle. Given that the launch cost of a Falcon is already way less than the reused launch cost of a Shuttle I think if they can get 3-4 launches per rocket they'll massively reduce the cost to put stuff up. They already have done that anyway, they undercut pretty much everyone who is currently launching, sometimes hilariously. Musk said in one of his speeches to congress (iirc) (paraphrasing) "Our launch costs are so low that the cost of launch plus the satellite is less than ULA's launch cost alone, so you buy a launch and get a satellite for free".
    - JshWright 11y ago
      Yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm an all-in SpaceX fanboy, I just think getting the stage back on the ground is likely a smaller fraction of the task than we expect.
      - noir_lord 11y ago
        I agree somewhat however you need it to not become a fireball on landing first, then you need to figure out if you can launch it again at all and then you need to figure out how to get that re-launch cost down. They've designed this for that purpose but he mentioned in the post launch talk that they will do 10 test firings on this one before they re-launch it. I think they'll pull it off but they might have a few undergo rapidly unplanned disassembly along the way.
underwater 11y ago
Maybe you could argue that it is a more important technological milestone but landing on the moon was a huge cultural moment. There was a huge build up and the world stopped to watch it happen. This is why people still talk about it. Very few people are aware of who SpaceX are, let alone the specifics of their launches.
dghughes 11y ago
Blue Origin already landed their rocket last year just not on a barge.
- BloodOfSokar 11y ago
  Blue Origin flew straight up then straight back down and landed, which SpaceX had already done a bunch of times before them.
  - dghughes 11y ago
    Are you sure? Anything I can see shows it's after the Nov 2015 Blue Origin successful landing. Not that it matters I'm just curious.
    - extrapickles 11y ago
      SpaceX had a rocket called grasshopper that went up and back down Blue Origin style (it didn't goto space though). Grasshopper was much closer in complexity to what Blue Origin did vs what SpaceX just did.
- moultano 11y ago
  They didn't go to orbit. Not in the same league.
  - dghughes 11y ago
    But Blue Origin has sent rockets 100km up i.e. the Kármán line which is considered outer space, and landed. I think they've done a great deal just as SpaceX has I don't understand the dismissal of what they do why can't people be excited for both?
    - moultano 11y ago
      https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ That does a good job of explaining it. Space isn't very far away. The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is the difference between something you can build in your garage and NASA.
maxxxxx 11y ago
The moon landing was just 12 years after the first satellite had been launched. On the way they had to solve a lot of problems that had never been solved before and nobody knew if they could even be solved. What SpaceX has done is cool and a big step in commoditization of space but essentially they had the balls to finally do something that could probably have been done 20 years ago.
peter303 11y ago
Older people will remember the Space Shuttle as reusuable spacecraft. Although it nver reached its planned capacity of 25 missions a year (average four), a 134 missions were impressive.

danbruc 11y ago

Nope. I don't want to diminish this great technological achievement in any way but this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. Actually I am not even sure that setting foot on Mars will top the Moon, in some sense it's the same thing. And yes, I am aware of the huge difference between Moon and Mars. The first permanent human outpost, whether on the Moon, on Mars or elsewhere, may be the next step after going to the Moon and living in space stations that doesn't have the feel of an incremental step.

pilsetnieks 11y ago
I agree that this isn't a Moon-landing scale event, it could be more similar to the first Apollo launch, or maybe the first Space Shuttle launch. This isn't so impressive in itself as it is in what it enables for the future. However, I would disagree that Mars is just more of the same as was the Moon landing. It would be not unlike saying that because Columbus went to America, later discoveries weren't so impressive.
- danbruc 11y ago
  I see this in a slightly different way. I consider (mass)producing chips with billions of transistors, building 200 meter high skyscrapers and similar things as impressive achievements even though they are kind of routine at this point. But they are no longer doing something for the first time and I think doing something for the first time is an important part of what makes an impressive event a really outstanding one. And at least for me right now going to Mars seems not sufficiently different from going to the Moon to have the feel of a first but that is surly very subjective.
hyperpallium 11y ago
It is the clearest milestone of a new era - in a way the moon landings and shuttle turned out not to be - space travel where the main expense is fuel.
- XorNot 11y ago
  The next one will be the first reusable flight with a booster.
omni 11y ago
> this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. You're right, this landing is a much bigger deal long-term. The Apollo program proved that one of the world superpowers, with a decades-long presidential mandate and a giant, massive bucket of funding, could do incredible things.[1] It was awesome, and it's clearly one of the defining moments in human history. However, the pace of space travel actually decreased after the Apollo program.[2] This probably had something to do with the fact that nobody wanted to spend untold billions of dollars to keep doing this stuff. The Moon landing was a big deal, but it was a one-off big deal. It didn't have world-changing impacts on the future, only on the moment. The whole Mars objective of SpaceX probably isn't going to be their lasting contribution to humanity. All their technological achievements so far pale in comparison to how hard it will be to live on Mars. They may well fail. However, the reusability improvements they are making have significant potential to increase the rate of space flight for the rest of our existence. That's a gift-that-keeps-on-giving big deal, and enables all sorts of options that were prohibitively expensive before. We're all really hoping the graph in [2] starts spiking up soon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbital_launch_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbita...
- sigmar 11y ago
  >The Moon landing was a big deal, but it was a one-off big deal. It didn't have world-changing impacts on the future, only on the moment. I very much agree with this sentiment and your other points. I think the comment you are replying to is thinking about this achievement in a 20th century frame-of-reference[1], and not considering the tremendous amount of potential cheaper space travel has. [1] By this I mean that he is thinking of space exploration nothing more than an inspirational endeavour.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > decades-long presidential mandate A small note to put things into perspective: moon landing happened only 12 (!) years after Sputnik. It happened only 8 (!) years after Kennedy's speech and Gagarin's first space walk. The first launch of actual Apollo equipment was 3.5 years before the manned landing. In other words: humans went from launching the first satellite to putting people on the Moon in 12 years. In 8 years from first person in space to first person on the Moon. That's the speed of focused progress. Something we very much lack these days.
sigmar 11y ago
>this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. I strongly disagree. Landing on the moon provides evidence that humanity is technologically capable of space travel. More or less a proof of concept. But markedly reducing the cost of going into outer space means that humanity now has access to space tourism and whatever future benefits space brings. No one knows about the first digital computers in the 1940s. The general public sees the computer revolution as happening in the 80s and 90s, because that is when computers were made available to consumers.
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I agree. Fifty years since we stepped on the moon, and we're just now re-using rockets? It's a great accomplishment, no doubt. Many congratulations to all involved. But this should have been done in the 1970s. The same economic drivers that lead us to do it today were still there back in the day. What happened is that we lost sight of the economics of space travel -- if we ever had our eye on them in the first place. We chased a rabbit down the wrong hole. Political systems exist and thrive for political reasons. NASA was always going to be about bringing home the bacon to defense contractors and looking good for the current administration. Elon is stuck with an economics/efficiency goal: make it both safe and cheap. Just to be clear, my comment has nothing to do with the great folks at Space-X. I'm a huge fan. My point is that they're just continuing the natural evolution of spaceflight. But in the big picture, it's an incremental achievement (and yep, I know how difficult it was. All of this stuff is difficult.) The next big goal is probably regularly-scheduled private manned spaceflights. And no, I don't mean sub-orbital fun rides. More like week-long tourist trips to the space station or a moon base. This would indicate that 1) access to space is truly becoming relatively cheap and reliable, and 2) there's actually somewhere to go. Historic things are things we do for the first time, sure. Re-landing a rocket qualifies, but it is much in the category of orbital-docking: necessary but a footnote. Anybody remember the first manned space mission that did docking? How about that remembering the first one to leave Earth orbit? Space fans like me would know. But not in the history books for the general public. Note that the question was about how historically important this is. Not how critical it is to spaceflight, or any other qualifier. It can be stupendously important in terms of the technical details, yet have very little value historically.
autokad 11y ago
moon and mars basically the same thing? O_O the radiation earth||mars and earth||moon are quite different in both duration and intensity. I believe its something they really haven't figured out. speaking of duration, that's a big deal in both fuel and effect on human passengers. but lets get to the important stuff, mars is actually a planet, with an atmosphere. saying the two are equivalent is more or less saying kicking a field goal outside on a windy day is the same as kicking one in a dome. except when you miss everyone dies. you also need 5x escape velocity from mars (we want them to come back too), which means more fuel and landing with lots of fuel. or at the very least sending fuel prior and hope nothing happens to it.
- DiThi 11y ago
  It's very likely that methane engines will be used. Methane will be easy to make in mars and it's much more dense than hydrogen. Also terraforming mars will probably involve dumping methane into the atmosphere.
- throwaway5752 11y ago
  The Moon landing in the context of science and technologies available in the mid- to late-60's was an absolutely monumental human achievement that won't soon be equaled. It was just 66 years after the Wright brothers! ps - I think the landing yesterday was a pretty sizable achievement.

ForHackernews 11y ago

Shuttle booster rockets were already reusable.

timdiggerm 11y ago
Only sorta barely https://www.quora.com/Space-Shuttle-How-much-money-was-saved-by-reusing-the-Solid-Rocket-Boosters-SRBs-instead-of-making-them-disposable https://www.quora.com/Space-Shuttle-How-much-money-was-saved...
JshWright 11y ago
They were also basically empty metal tubes that solid fuel was packed into. But perhaps more relevant to point, the shuttle itself was "reusable". It remains to be seen if SpaceX can reuse rockets in a more cost effective way than the shuttle.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  > It remains to be seen if SpaceX can reuse rockets in a more cost effective way than the shuttle. Given that the launch cost of a Falcon is already way less than the reused launch cost of a Shuttle I think if they can get 3-4 launches per rocket they'll massively reduce the cost to put stuff up. They already have done that anyway, they undercut pretty much everyone who is currently launching, sometimes hilariously. Musk said in one of his speeches to congress (iirc) (paraphrasing) "Our launch costs are so low that the cost of launch plus the satellite is less than ULA's launch cost alone, so you buy a launch and get a satellite for free".
  - JshWright 11y ago
    Yeah, don't get me wrong, I'm an all-in SpaceX fanboy, I just think getting the stage back on the ground is likely a smaller fraction of the task than we expect.
    - noir_lord 11y ago
      I agree somewhat however you need it to not become a fireball on landing first, then you need to figure out if you can launch it again at all and then you need to figure out how to get that re-launch cost down. They've designed this for that purpose but he mentioned in the post launch talk that they will do 10 test firings on this one before they re-launch it. I think they'll pull it off but they might have a few undergo rapidly unplanned disassembly along the way.

underwater 11y ago

Maybe you could argue that it is a more important technological milestone but landing on the moon was a huge cultural moment. There was a huge build up and the world stopped to watch it happen. This is why people still talk about it. Very few people are aware of who SpaceX are, let alone the specifics of their launches.

dghughes 11y ago

Blue Origin already landed their rocket last year just not on a barge.

BloodOfSokar 11y ago
Blue Origin flew straight up then straight back down and landed, which SpaceX had already done a bunch of times before them.
- dghughes 11y ago
  Are you sure? Anything I can see shows it's after the Nov 2015 Blue Origin successful landing. Not that it matters I'm just curious.
  - extrapickles 11y ago
    SpaceX had a rocket called grasshopper that went up and back down Blue Origin style (it didn't goto space though). Grasshopper was much closer in complexity to what Blue Origin did vs what SpaceX just did.
moultano 11y ago
They didn't go to orbit. Not in the same league.
- dghughes 11y ago
  But Blue Origin has sent rockets 100km up i.e. the Kármán line which is considered outer space, and landed. I think they've done a great deal just as SpaceX has I don't understand the dismissal of what they do why can't people be excited for both?
  - moultano 11y ago
    https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ That does a good job of explaining it. Space isn't very far away. The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is the difference between something you can build in your garage and NASA.

maxxxxx 11y ago

The moon landing was just 12 years after the first satellite had been launched. On the way they had to solve a lot of problems that had never been solved before and nobody knew if they could even be solved. What SpaceX has done is cool and a big step in commoditization of space but essentially they had the balls to finally do something that could probably have been done 20 years ago.

peter303 11y ago

Older people will remember the Space Shuttle as reusuable spacecraft. Although it nver reached its planned capacity of 25 missions a year (average four), a 134 missions were impressive.