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SpaceX was founded 14 years ago. In another 10 years, they'll likely have what you describe on their Mars base. The velocity of this company is simply unprecede

• toomanybeersies 10y ago
  That's 8 years for F9, and 9 years for the Shuttle. I wouldn't call 1 year faster unprecedented. The Apollo program was unprecedented. It took only 8 years to put a man on the moon, from putting a man in space.
  • SEJeff 10y ago
    9 years for an agency with lots of space and rocket experience vs 8 years for a company with no space or rocket experience at all. There is no comparison between the two.
    • ethbro 10y ago
      Not diminishing SpaceX's achievements, but like everything else they've been built on the back of a lot of basic science. One of NASA's primary goals is actually technology transfer (see: http://technology.nasa.gov/ http://technology.nasa.gov/ ).
      • tbabb 10y ago
        And also, again, not diminishing SpaceX's achievements, but the space shuttle was a substantially more ambitious project than the f9.
        • TrevorJ 10y ago
          Ambitious in it's actual design certainly. It arguably never achieved much of that ambition though, at least in regards to reusability cost savings.
    • cptskippy 10y ago
      SpaceX is staffed by some of the brightest aerospace engineers and scientists with decades of aerospace industry experience. Tom Mueller and Gwynne Shotwell had over 3 decades of experience between them in the aerospace industry before they joined SpaceX. To say they had not space or rocket experience is absurd. Additionally SpaceX has received tremendous support from NASA both financially and technically. SpaceX has received close to half a billion dollars in "seed money" from NASA and has contracts for almost three billion dollars from them. NASA provides an extraordinary amount of technical oversight and guidance to SpaceX. That's not to say SpaceX hasn't made significant advancements, Boeing has considerably more experience and received similar amounts of funding from NASA but has failed to achieve nearly what SpaceX has.
      • SEJeff 10y ago
        Sorry should have specific, otherwise I'll get downvoted into oblivion. In lack of experience, I meant supply chain / logistics, manufacturing, etc. They had to spin up a factory from scratch with, as a company, having never done it before. Sure NASA had to do some of that, but they largely had much of these bits in place from past projects or could re-use contracts from existing manufacturers. A huge part of this is simply negotiating with other companies that supply parts. Additionally, they did a lot of entirely new ways of doing things. As far as I'm aware, SpaceX's method of friction welding is one of the best in the industry. Additionally, they 3d print some of the parts for the engines, the main oxidizer valve is one of note. Pretty sure they were also one of the first to do this. So in summary, even with veterans of the industry, they are doing things in a way never done before in history, so that doesn't negate the fact that it was revolutionary what they've managed to do.
        • cptskippy 10y ago
          SpaceX isn't mass producing rockets, it's low volume to the point that each rocket is almost a one off custom development. There's no robot factory churning out rockets. This is also where Musk comes into play, he isn't the rocket scientist behind SpaceX, he's everything else. Musk keeps his companies fairly interconnected and manages to effectively share resources between them. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/05/elon_musk_s_tesla_spacex_and_solarcity_are_unusually_interdependent_is_that.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2016/05/elo... Sure SpaceX has a lot of innovative technology but then so did the Space Shuttle. It certainly wasn't cobbled together from off the shelf technology. Almost everything about it was new and innovative. Additionally SpaceX has the advantage of advanced technologies that weren't available when the shuttle was designed. Additive manufacturing is one you alluded to but also advanced computer modelling, advanced alloys, and all of the advanced sensor technologies that simply didn't exist for the shuttle. All of this allows for a level of rapid prototyping not possible in the 70s.
• ethbro 10y ago
  To be fair, Apollo ran from '61-'72, developed the Saturn series of rockets, associated technology, landed six missions on the moon, and cost somewhere around $100-200B* (USD$2010). *Sad context: Iraq War @ $750B-$1.1T (USD$2010)
  • SEJeff 10y ago
    Apollo was "human kind changing", I would say so is making rocket launches and landings as commonplace as jet flights.
• deleted 10y ago
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