9 ms·

Compared to what was achieved in the 60s it doesn't seem that impressive.

murukesh_s 10y ago
Yea even though I was not born then, I can imagine. It shattered lots of long held popular beliefs and took mankind to a whole new level.
sethrin 10y ago
What was achieved in the 60s built on what had come before. Goddard worked out the principles of liquid-fuel rocketry in the 20s and 30s, John Clark (and presumably others, but he wrote the book) developed rocket fuels in the 50s and 60s, and Von Braun took Army money to build large rockets based on science other people had worked out between 1940 and the 1960s. Setting aside a certain amount of arguing about whose developments were more important, it's probably safe to say that most of the impressive developments of the 60s were actually developed earlier.
- paulmd 10y ago
  Well, why stop there? Could Goddard have powered his rockets without chemistry that was developed in the 1800s? Literally all science is built incrementally on previous discoveries. In the words of Isaac Newton, "we stand on the shoulders of giants". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g... That said, SpaceX certainly isn't doing anything more than an incremental improvement on previous ideas, of course. Even the Space Shuttle used refurbished boosters, this is just the same idea with a much faster refurbishment cycle.
  - geerlingguy 10y ago
    And hopefully magnitudes less expensive refurbishment. That was what really killed the orbiter/shuttle program.
  - sethrin 10y ago
    Well why stop there? The origin of the cosmos... Newton's remark was mostly a backhanded slur against Hooke, as far as can be told. If you can point to some novel development in rocket fuel or rocket engine engineering of the 1950s that somehow contradicts my account, I am sure that I would be grateful of the correction. I wasn't alive then nor am I a particularly good scholar. But I did read Dr. Clark's book, which I understand to be the authoritative work on the subject, and the distinctions in the persons and nationalities involved in the periods in question do seem to be fairly distinct. Von Braun acknowledged the influence of Goddard explicitly, and the post-war and pre-Mercury/Apollo era of rocket science does seem to be quite an interesting one both scientifically and politically. As far as the fundamental science of rocket fuel goes, yes, there is unfortunately not much further to be done, but every science has noted limits to efficiency. But if I may repeat myself somewhat, the point was not that there had been prior art, but that nothing particularly important happened in the 1960s. There are only so many chemical reactions that are suitable for liquid fuel rocketry, and -- pertinent to the news event -- SpaceX is going down a very well-worn thermodynamic road with these rockets. So the impressive point, the reason that anyone is giving these people business, is not that they have any sort of greater chemistry-related insight than anyone else, but that they are planning on re-using enough components to drive launch costs down. But they haven't actually done that yet. They have yet to re-use anything but the barges. So perhaps in that sense, one could consider the achievements of the 60s and SpaceX to be equally lackluster, but otherwise it seems like a poor comparison.
    - dotancohen 10y ago
      > Newton's remark was mostly a backhanded slur against Hooke, as far as can be told. Could you expand on that? I am aware of the feud between the two, but I fail to see how this insults Hooke.
      - Natsu 10y ago
        Basically Hooke was short, so he Newton was backhandedly saying he didn't get his ideas from him. Since then it has acquired a secondary meaning apart from the insult.
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Given that, what great achievements in space we have pulled off in the 2010s when so much hard work was done before?
cyberferret 10y ago
No one was landing booster rockets again after launch in the 60's...
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Ya sure, landing booster rockets is a way bigger deal than sending men to the Moon.
  - MrFlynn 10y ago
    > Ya sure, landing booster rockets is a way bigger deal than sending men to the Moon. I don’t think anyone is claiming that. They’re both impressive feats in their own right.
  - cyberferret 10y ago
    Some might argue that having an unlimited budget, and nearly a million people working on a project, and utilising 'throwaway technology' would be arbitrarily easier than trying to do it with private funding. Moon travel is not a common everyday thing now, because the original effort wasn't geared for that - it was primarily to put a man on the moon as fast as possible, before the Russians did it. If the aircraft industry worked the same way and airlines had to throw away a 747 after each flight, it wouldn't be an every day thing like it is now. SpaceX are essentially setting up the future building blocks for far more affordable and common space flight now. It is a longer path, and IMO no less difficult than what NASA was doing back in the 50's and 60's.
    - babyrainbow 10y ago
      >SpaceX are essentially setting up the future building blocks for far more affordable and common space flight now. What exactly is the breakthroughs/discoveries that Spacex have made that will justify the claim. Please note that landing the rocket does not count. Because I don't think it involved something new, some new technique that was unknown before.
      - 10y ago
nickpsecurity 10y ago
How much did the work in the 60s cost? I imagine it was multiples of what SpaceX has spent.
xenadu02 10y ago
With unlimited money almost any engineering problem can be solved. It isn't a miracle men walked on the moon, we just decided to go. >Compared to what was achieved in the 60s it doesn't seem that impressive. Is all of computing since 1960 unexciting and pointless? It's just making computers faster and cheaper, so what? The internet? We already had networks, who cares? It turns out that scale matters. Cost matters. Access matters. Details matter. If you can't see the value of treating rockets more like airplanes then you have a small-minded worldview and I don't know what to tell you. History is littered with inventions that didn't amount to a hill of beans until someone else found a way to turn that invention into an awesome product and sell it to a much wider audience. When a trip into orbit costs $20,000 then a lot more people can go. When it costs $2,000 then anyone in the developed world can go. What impact that will have on our society?
- babyrainbow 10y ago
  >When a trip into orbit costs $20,000 then a lot more people can go. When it costs $2,000 then anyone in the developed world can go. What impact that will have on our society? Are you seriously implying that landing a rocket is an unprecedented step in that direction? Do you think something like this would have been impossible if people had set their minds to do it, in the 60. I don't think so. I mean, we had missiles that could follow and destroy jets moving faster than a bullet...like, I don't know, 30 years back? Exactly that is why I think this is just marketing and PR (Not the actual stuff they are doing, but how it is seen and projected)...
  - fsloth 10y ago
    I don't know if they could have reduced costs as agressively in the 60's. The market was then smaller and making things more expensive (as the world population was smaller and productivity was lower than today). I don't know if this matters though. I'm sure soviet russia could have manufactured space tourist busses in stead of all the nukes and launchers they did as they played by a bit different economic rules. That would have been awesome. Instead we got just an opportunity for thousand megadeaths.
  - simonh 10y ago
simonh 10y ago
I'm going to break with the pack and say you are quite right. By itself landing the boosters isn't a dramatic achievement. After all they're not even manned. But it's not about landing the boosters, it's about what this will enable in the future. If Musk really can reduce the cost to orbit by a factor of 100 it will revolutionise space transport. Imagine a series of moon landings just like in the 60s and 70s, but all using the same launchers and spacecraft? How about manned missions to Mars in reusable ships? It's the first step in a new era. So ok it's not headline grabing next to the moon landings. But compared to that, the Mercury missions don't look all that much of an achievement in hindsight. Yet they were vital groundwork.
- fsloth 10y ago
  Yeah, I agree. It's not the technology that's awesomest but the economy model it facilitates.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  The economy factor is the main point here that many seem to be missing. SpaceX has already more than halved (and in some cases quartered) the cost of sending satellites into orbit. Heck, even NASA is finding it cheaper to contract satellite launched to SpaceX, and several countries who wouldn't previously have been able to afford to send their own hardware into space are now finding it viable. For all of the marvellous things done in the 60's space program, we are now half a century down the track from that and things were still expensive with a lot of throwaway hardware. The orbiter (shuttle) program never really delivered on the reduced cost it promised. It has really only been in the past decade or so that private industry has taken up the reins and pushed the technology for more cost effective space travel.
- TrevorJ 10y ago
  I mean, from an engineering perspective it's pretty dramatic. The rocket is going two kilometers a second in the wrong direction, it has to null out that speed, hit a moving target in the middle of the ocean and come to a stop. The rocket is too light to hover (the engine can't be throttled low enough, it's too powerful) so the velocity must be zero'd out right at the deck, too early and the rocket starts moving back up, too late and it hits the boat and blows up.

Yea even though I was not born then, I can imagine. It shattered lots of long held popular beliefs and took mankind to a whole new level.

sethrin 10y ago

What was achieved in the 60s built on what had come before. Goddard worked out the principles of liquid-fuel rocketry in the 20s and 30s, John Clark (and presumably others, but he wrote the book) developed rocket fuels in the 50s and 60s, and Von Braun took Army money to build large rockets based on science other people had worked out between 1940 and the 1960s. Setting aside a certain amount of arguing about whose developments were more important, it's probably safe to say that most of the impressive developments of the 60s were actually developed earlier.

paulmd 10y ago
Well, why stop there? Could Goddard have powered his rockets without chemistry that was developed in the 1800s? Literally all science is built incrementally on previous discoveries. In the words of Isaac Newton, "we stand on the shoulders of giants". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_g... That said, SpaceX certainly isn't doing anything more than an incremental improvement on previous ideas, of course. Even the Space Shuttle used refurbished boosters, this is just the same idea with a much faster refurbishment cycle.
- geerlingguy 10y ago
  And hopefully magnitudes less expensive refurbishment. That was what really killed the orbiter/shuttle program.
- sethrin 10y ago
  Well why stop there? The origin of the cosmos... Newton's remark was mostly a backhanded slur against Hooke, as far as can be told. If you can point to some novel development in rocket fuel or rocket engine engineering of the 1950s that somehow contradicts my account, I am sure that I would be grateful of the correction. I wasn't alive then nor am I a particularly good scholar. But I did read Dr. Clark's book, which I understand to be the authoritative work on the subject, and the distinctions in the persons and nationalities involved in the periods in question do seem to be fairly distinct. Von Braun acknowledged the influence of Goddard explicitly, and the post-war and pre-Mercury/Apollo era of rocket science does seem to be quite an interesting one both scientifically and politically. As far as the fundamental science of rocket fuel goes, yes, there is unfortunately not much further to be done, but every science has noted limits to efficiency. But if I may repeat myself somewhat, the point was not that there had been prior art, but that nothing particularly important happened in the 1960s. There are only so many chemical reactions that are suitable for liquid fuel rocketry, and -- pertinent to the news event -- SpaceX is going down a very well-worn thermodynamic road with these rockets. So the impressive point, the reason that anyone is giving these people business, is not that they have any sort of greater chemistry-related insight than anyone else, but that they are planning on re-using enough components to drive launch costs down. But they haven't actually done that yet. They have yet to re-use anything but the barges. So perhaps in that sense, one could consider the achievements of the 60s and SpaceX to be equally lackluster, but otherwise it seems like a poor comparison.
  - dotancohen 10y ago
    > Newton's remark was mostly a backhanded slur against Hooke, as far as can be told. Could you expand on that? I am aware of the feud between the two, but I fail to see how this insults Hooke.
    - Natsu 10y ago
      Basically Hooke was short, so he Newton was backhandedly saying he didn't get his ideas from him. Since then it has acquired a secondary meaning apart from the insult.
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Given that, what great achievements in space we have pulled off in the 2010s when so much hard work was done before?

cyberferret 10y ago

No one was landing booster rockets again after launch in the 60's...

maverick_iceman 10y ago
Ya sure, landing booster rockets is a way bigger deal than sending men to the Moon.
- MrFlynn 10y ago
  > Ya sure, landing booster rockets is a way bigger deal than sending men to the Moon. I don’t think anyone is claiming that. They’re both impressive feats in their own right.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Some might argue that having an unlimited budget, and nearly a million people working on a project, and utilising 'throwaway technology' would be arbitrarily easier than trying to do it with private funding. Moon travel is not a common everyday thing now, because the original effort wasn't geared for that - it was primarily to put a man on the moon as fast as possible, before the Russians did it. If the aircraft industry worked the same way and airlines had to throw away a 747 after each flight, it wouldn't be an every day thing like it is now. SpaceX are essentially setting up the future building blocks for far more affordable and common space flight now. It is a longer path, and IMO no less difficult than what NASA was doing back in the 50's and 60's.
  - babyrainbow 10y ago
    >SpaceX are essentially setting up the future building blocks for far more affordable and common space flight now. What exactly is the breakthroughs/discoveries that Spacex have made that will justify the claim. Please note that landing the rocket does not count. Because I don't think it involved something new, some new technique that was unknown before.
    - 10y ago

nickpsecurity 10y ago

How much did the work in the 60s cost? I imagine it was multiples of what SpaceX has spent.

xenadu02 10y ago

With unlimited money almost any engineering problem can be solved. It isn't a miracle men walked on the moon, we just decided to go. >Compared to what was achieved in the 60s it doesn't seem that impressive. Is all of computing since 1960 unexciting and pointless? It's just making computers faster and cheaper, so what? The internet? We already had networks, who cares? It turns out that scale matters. Cost matters. Access matters. Details matter. If you can't see the value of treating rockets more like airplanes then you have a small-minded worldview and I don't know what to tell you. History is littered with inventions that didn't amount to a hill of beans until someone else found a way to turn that invention into an awesome product and sell it to a much wider audience. When a trip into orbit costs $20,000 then a lot more people can go. When it costs $2,000 then anyone in the developed world can go. What impact that will have on our society?

babyrainbow 10y ago
>When a trip into orbit costs $20,000 then a lot more people can go. When it costs $2,000 then anyone in the developed world can go. What impact that will have on our society? Are you seriously implying that landing a rocket is an unprecedented step in that direction? Do you think something like this would have been impossible if people had set their minds to do it, in the 60. I don't think so. I mean, we had missiles that could follow and destroy jets moving faster than a bullet...like, I don't know, 30 years back? Exactly that is why I think this is just marketing and PR (Not the actual stuff they are doing, but how it is seen and projected)...
- fsloth 10y ago
  I don't know if they could have reduced costs as agressively in the 60's. The market was then smaller and making things more expensive (as the world population was smaller and productivity was lower than today). I don't know if this matters though. I'm sure soviet russia could have manufactured space tourist busses in stead of all the nukes and launchers they did as they played by a bit different economic rules. That would have been awesome. Instead we got just an opportunity for thousand megadeaths.
- simonh 10y ago

simonh 10y ago

I'm going to break with the pack and say you are quite right. By itself landing the boosters isn't a dramatic achievement. After all they're not even manned. But it's not about landing the boosters, it's about what this will enable in the future. If Musk really can reduce the cost to orbit by a factor of 100 it will revolutionise space transport. Imagine a series of moon landings just like in the 60s and 70s, but all using the same launchers and spacecraft? How about manned missions to Mars in reusable ships? It's the first step in a new era. So ok it's not headline grabing next to the moon landings. But compared to that, the Mercury missions don't look all that much of an achievement in hindsight. Yet they were vital groundwork.

fsloth 10y ago
Yeah, I agree. It's not the technology that's awesomest but the economy model it facilitates.
cyberferret 10y ago
The economy factor is the main point here that many seem to be missing. SpaceX has already more than halved (and in some cases quartered) the cost of sending satellites into orbit. Heck, even NASA is finding it cheaper to contract satellite launched to SpaceX, and several countries who wouldn't previously have been able to afford to send their own hardware into space are now finding it viable. For all of the marvellous things done in the 60's space program, we are now half a century down the track from that and things were still expensive with a lot of throwaway hardware. The orbiter (shuttle) program never really delivered on the reduced cost it promised. It has really only been in the past decade or so that private industry has taken up the reins and pushed the technology for more cost effective space travel.
TrevorJ 10y ago
I mean, from an engineering perspective it's pretty dramatic. The rocket is going two kilometers a second in the wrong direction, it has to null out that speed, hit a moving target in the middle of the ocean and come to a stop. The rocket is too light to hover (the engine can't be throttled low enough, it's too powerful) so the velocity must be zero'd out right at the deck, too early and the rocket starts moving back up, too late and it hits the boat and blows up.