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Amazing! I genuinely think that this is a bigger deal than the moon landings. The moon landings were pretty awesome in their own way, but at the end of the day
by ufmace 10y ago
Amazing! I genuinely think that this is a bigger deal than the moon landings.
The moon landings were pretty awesome in their own way, but at the end of the day, with the way they were done, it was basically a stunt. None of it put any infrastructure for the long-term access of space into place, or anything to make future moon landings easier.
This paves the way for the costs of space flight to be cut in half, or even a little further. This has the potential to set off an exponential chain of growth of space travel. The further they cut prices, the more customers and launches there are. The more customers there are, the more profit they make, to be plowed back into better, more reliable, and more reusable rockets. And the more incentive their competitors have to come up with their own reusable rockets. The more reusable they are, the further they can bring prices down. Every step reinforces the next, and in 30-50 years, the price of a launch may well be a tenth of what it is today. Maybe closer to a hundredth.
What will we build when access to space costs 1% of what it does today? Maybe a huge space station, or a moon colony, or asteroid mining, or all of the above. The more traffic we have to space, the more infrastructure we build, and the cheaper and more reliable it all gets. Off-world colonies might become about as practical as a trip to and colony in Antarctica is today - still tough and hazardous, but well within the budget and vision of any developed nation. This is freakin' awesome for the future!
- sidcool 10y ago"A small thrust for a rocket, a big boost for mankind" I am super happy for this achievement.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago> The moon landings were pretty awesome in their own way, but at the end of the day, with the way they were done, it was basically a stunt. It was a pissing contest between the superpowers. That doesn't mean there's less merit in that. In fact, what they did in the '60s was a heck of a lot harder, achieving so much with less tech, and hewing a new path through a virgin jungle. It simply means - and explains why - those achievements didn't last. We put in a humongous effort to reach so far, but once the initial impetus died out, we had to scale it down. Well, now we're back.
- boznz 10y agoJust need a pissing contest between SpaceX and Blue Origin now and everyone will benefit
- nojvek 10y agoBlue origin isn't even in the same league. Their rockets go straight up, stay there for a bit and down again. Spacex achieves magnitudes higher velocity, altitude and actually delivers things to orbit. BlueOrigin is Bezos' pet project akin to taking a heli tour around the city while SpaceX is doing a transcontinental flight half way around the world.
- mksaunders 10y agoGP said we need a contest – not that we have one. And when New Glenn starts flying in a few years, we'll definitely have that contest. You're right that New Shepard doesn't compare to what SpaceX is doing at the moment, but Blue Origin is working on much, much bigger rockets...
- ufmace 10y agoThat's true, but I'd still root for a pissing contest between them. IIRC, SpaceX started out like this as well. They're like a decade ahead or so, but maybe Blue Origin can catch up faster with SpaceX having shown that it's possible and economically feasible. The more companies that can do this, the better off we all are.
- ams6110 10y agoThe space program of the 1960s, culminating with the moon landings, seems like a far greater achievement to me than what SpaceX is doing, adjusted for the state of the art.
- sixQuarks 10y agoNasa was spending close to 5% of the federal budget back then, about $35-40 billion per year in today's dollars. The space program cost hundreds of billions. spaceX has done it by raising less than $1.5 billion total
- rtkwe 10y agoIt helps drive the costs down when you're not inventing the entire field basically from scratch. Not saying what they've accomplished isn't impressive but it's very much a 'standing on the soldiers of giants' situation.
- greeneggs 10y ago> spaceX has done it by raising less than $1.5 billion total NASA has itself given SpaceX more than that. Wikipedia says SpaceX has taken $5 billion from NASA, with over $1 billion more from US defense contracts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#NASA_contracts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#NASA_contracts
- sixQuarks 10y agoyeah, but that's revenue, not the same thing.
- msl 10y ago> None of it put any infrastructure for the long-term access of space into place, or anything to make future moon landings easier. This is not entirely fair. The actual landings (which did teach us a lot about the moon) were just the tip of an iceberg. Consider project Gemini [1] for example. A dozen missions and several astronaut-weeks of space time to get hang of such consepts as rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft and extra vehicular activity, all of utmost importance in modern space exploration. Much of the hardware developed for the Apollo program was also very versatile, as demonstrated by, for example, the Skylab program [2]. A lot more mileage could have been extracted from the investment by means of the Apollo Aplications Program [3] had it not been killed to make way for the STS (I'm simplifying the history somewhat on this point). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program
- falsedan 10y agoJust a note that the USSR space station program completely outpaced the US with Salyut & had automatic docking procedures for unsupervised unmanned resupply missions in the 70s. The core module for Mir2 became the core of the ISS.
- valuearb 10y agoAlso the Buran could and did fly totally automated. NASA refused to allow the Shuttle to, because they didn't want it to be used for unmanned missions.
- ufmace 10y agoWe did learn a lot, but that's kind of the problem. All of the capital that was created was intellectual - knowledge and experience, mostly in the heads of the few hundred or however many people that were the core of the team. Very useful while you have it, but also very easy to dissolve as soon as the funding goes away and all of the people with that knowledge scatter. That's also the problem with Government funding of things like this. You can accomplish some pretty awesome things with a blank check from the Government, but those only get created for political reasons, and are subject to disappearing for political reasons as well. Businesses have their own problems, but once they put together a system they can turn a profit with, they have the incentive to keep doing it and improving on it indefinitely.
- vermontdevil 10y agoYa know the Pintle injector that Merlin engines use came from the Apollo program. Just one example why I consider the Apollo program to be one of our greater achievements. But SpaceX has done a lot on their own too. I'm just glad to be alive to see this.