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I remain confused about why SpaceX is getting so much fanfare and praise. What have they accomplished that NASA didn't already accomplish during the Apollo miss

• jacquesm 10y ago
  NASA landed a first stage on a barge to be re-used?
  • lmm 10y ago
    NASA reused every engine (not just the first stage) of an orbital payload delivery system, many times, 30 years ago. Runway rather than barge but that's not really an important difference. (The exciting part will be much cheaper refurbishment than the STS. But SpaceX haven't actually delivered on that component yet)
    • justifier 10y ago
      > Runway rather than barge but that's not really an important difference. it is an important difference when you look beyond earth the moon, mars, and any future site that has yet to send robots to pave a runaway that is: 4,500 meters long, 91 meters wide, and 40 centimeters thick(o); will necessarily be vertical take off and landing (o) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Landing_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Landing_Facility
      • lmm 10y ago
        If and when SpaceX land rockets beyond Earth, that will very much be something to get excited about.
        • odonnellryan 10y ago
          This argument makes no sense.
          • lmm 10y ago
            The point is that SpaceX hasn't yet accomplished anything NASA didn't. That SpaceX's approach will be more suitable to future things is not a good counterargument.
            • odonnellryan 10y ago
              They have: they're cheaper, they've developed new technologies, and they're doing it privately. > That SpaceX's approach will be more suitable to future things is not a good counterargument. No one is saying that, they're just being positive and looking forward to the future. How is that bad?
              • lmm 10y ago
                Doing things cheaper is good, sure. All I'm saying is that zupreme's original point is fair (they haven't (yet) really done anything concrete that NASA haven't (just done it cheaper), and the current enthusiasm is perhaps disproportionate)
        • placeybordeaux 10y ago
          We can agree on that!
      • warfangle 10y ago
        Also kinda hard to glide in for a landing when there's little/no atmosphere...
    • robszumski 10y ago
      While that is true, by the time they rebuilt them, you might as well call them new engines. SpaceX took their landed first stage directly over to the test pad to fire the engines multiple times. It's not really apples to apples.
      • lmm 10y ago
        If SpaceX can deliver what they're claiming in terms of refurb time/cost then that will be something to celebrate. But projects have a way of revealing unexpected challenges right at the last moment. I'm going to hold off the champagne until a refurbished booster actually flies.
        • jacquesm 10y ago
          That so negative. Of course they don't do this all in one go, it is incremental, step by step to get it to work. And each step is one closer to that goal and something to be happy about. If there are 'unexpected challenges right at the last moment' that's a real pity but those will be met just like all the unexpected challenges along the way. Yes, it's difficult, not it does not seem to be so impossibly difficult or different from what they've done to date that we should assume that it will not work. It will work, the bigger question is when.
    • CydeWeys 10y ago
      A shuttle launch cost over an order of magnitude more than a Falcon 9 launch does, though. This is hugely relevant because the biggest factor limiting space travel is cost more than it is anything else. The demand for space travel is absolutely there, and all that is required to satisfy that demand is simply lowering cost.
    • lfuller 10y ago
      Technically, the full SRBs were never (to my knowledge) re-used. Because of the salt water damage, they were parted out and some of those parts were used in new engines.
• Artemis2 10y ago
  Did NASA land anything else than the Space Shuttle?
  • wolf550e 10y ago
    Closest NASA got to this (besides the STS) was DC-X.
• nkrisc 10y ago
  I'm not sure you and I are following the same news. Granted, I was born in the 80s but I don't think NASA ever landed a first stage on a barge before.
• fixermark 10y ago
  Unfortunately, it's worth noting that while NASA's achievements were extremely laudable, it's an open question whether they could reproduce the results in a short timeframe. Some of the technologies of the Apollo era have been misplaced (either within NASA's large body of hard-copy material or never transferred from private contractors who have gone away). SpaceX is exciting because they're doing launches and landings right now, reliably and successfully.
• simonh 10y ago
  The Apollo missions were one-offs. They left nothing behind that future missions could utilize. Everything was disposed of after use, even Spacelab which had a very short life and completed a specific programme of missions and then burned up. The shuttle was the first attempt at re-usability but was far too expensive to be viable. Only the space station is genuinely long term re-useable infrastructure. It's something you can actually use as a platform for further missions beyond it's initial purpose but it also has been excessively expensive. We can't go on like this. Nobody is talking about a replacement space station, the appetite just isn't there. Unless somebody does something, the space station might be the last long term repeatedly occupied human habitat in space. SpaceX is doing something about that. If they really can reduce launch costs by a factor of 100:1, it will change the fundamental economics of everything we do in space. Suddenly going to the moon stops being a pointless gesture and becomes an economically viable long term proposition. Human habitats in space of the scale of the ISS or bigger become affordable. They're even talking about colonizing Mars and plan to do what's effectively a tech demo of that in 2018. For the first time the rocket man dreams of the 1970s look like they could actually happen. For a lot of people, that's pretty exciting. P.S. Downvotes for this question? Really? I'm as much a fan of SpaceX as anyone but it's a fair question, SpaceX haven't even launched one of their recovered rockets yet.
  • unethical_ban 10y ago
    The only two questions I see in your post are in the P.S. What am I missing?
    • simonh 10y ago
      I was referring to the question I was answering, which was getting greyed out. My bad, it was ambiguous and I should have tried to that clearer.
  • _kst_ 10y ago
    > Everything was disposed of after use, even Spacelab which had a very short life and completed a specific programme of missions and then burned up. Skylab, not Spacelab.
• agumonkey 10y ago
  Based on some talks the first lunar landings were way more adventurous and lucky than what SpaceX is doing. Making a snooker trick shot is nice, announcing it and doing it twice is another thing.
  • abduhl 10y ago
    What about announcing it and doing it six times? That's the number of times we landed men on the moon. Let's not try to downplay NASA's previous successes as "lucky" and "adventurous" in order to make SpaceX seem more advanced in an engineering sense.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      Announcing it seven times and doing it six times.... Luck did play a pretty big role in Apollo. This is not to discount the huge amount of work and skill that went into making most of those missions a success, but there was sometimes not a whole lot separating them from failure. Apollo 11's landing site ended up being covered with boulders and they nearly had to abort before they found a suitable landing site. Apollo 12 got hit by lightning on the way up, knocking out computers and nearly causing an abort. Apollo 13 came within seconds of exploding on launch, and was saved by a false fuel alarm shutting down the misbehaving engine. Of course, this is only to be expected when you're doing something so big and new. SpaceX has the benefit of all that experience.
    • agumonkey 10y ago
      You're right. Funnily my answer was an attempt at not dismissing SpaceX advances too.
    • knowaveragejoe 10y ago
      Luck was a significant factor, however. There were _so many_ things that could have gone wrong, that is not an understatement at all. They found bugs in the AGC's software years later that could have sent 3 men to their deaths, had they occurred.
  • puranjay 10y ago
• whatever_dude 10y ago
  NASA accomplished amazing engineering feats while aiming at certain (mostly) one-off goals. SpaceX (and others) are accomplishing amazing engineering feats aiming at sustainable, repeatable use of their technology, and improving as they go. Both are amazing accomplishments. But just because "landing a rocket on a barge" is not as sexy as "landing a ship with humans on the moon" doesn't mean it's that much less of an accomplishment. Remember vertical rocket landing is something NASA chose not to attempt because they thought it was going to be too hard. And that's just what SpaceX is doing.
• larrydag 10y ago
  As an Engineer I might be a little biased but I see this is a massive achievement. We are seeing a paradigm shift in space exploration with the rise of the influence of the private sector. Space exploration used to be the domain of government entities. That is gone now. I believe we are seeing a new age of exploration not seen since the 15th and 16th centuries of discovering the "new" world. These new space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and others are challenging the norms and will only push each other to new achievements that we haven't dreamed of yet. As you can tell count me excited.
  • SFJulie 10y ago
    As an idiot, is is less expensive than asking the NASA or the ESA, or any other providers? And well, can the "materials" really be recycled without loss of security/quality? Is the metal more expensive than the carburant/comburant?
    • zardo 10y ago
      Compared to NASA, around a 10x cost reduction. That's before reusability. >And well, can the "materials" really be recycled without loss of security/quality? They aren't going to recycle rockets, they're going to refly them. They are aiming for around 100 flights per airframe. >Is the metal more expensive than the carburant/comburant? The cost of the metal isn't the major concern, it's the cost of shaping the metal into a working rocket. But yes, fuel costs are a couple hundred thousand, rockets are tens of millions.
    • grey-area 10y ago
      Yes, Yes, and Yes.
• lmm 10y ago
  Quantity has a quality all of its own. Apollo-era NASA consumed 1.5% of the entire federal budget. You're right that SpaceX is still catching up, but they're doing it on a lot less than that to say the least. (Compare: 1980-present NASA has arguably never done anything as exciting as the Apollo programme) Red Dragon (assuming goes ahead as planned) will be the heaviest payload ever landed on another planet - an incremental improvement to be sure, but a real one. Mars sample return will be a concrete new thing that NASA never managed. Watch this space.
• InclinedPlane 10y ago
  They've done most of the hard work in demonstrating a fully reusable rocket stage of an orbital launch vehicle. That's historic, beating even what the Shuttle managed (the Orbiter was not a full stage). Nailing down the remaining operational workflow and they'll be able to achieve reusable rocketry, and bring down the cost of spaceflight significantly. It truly is the dawn of a new space age.