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How is it progress if they all do the same thing?

avmich 6y ago
The difference is roughly as between contemporary cars. Compare Chevy Impala of early 1960-s with today's Priuses. Of course this is just an analogy. We can study functional differences - while both Vostok and Crew Dragon can deliver a human to orbit and back, they differ a lot regarding how well they do that and what they can also do, in addition to the main functionality.
Robotbeat 6y ago
It’s progress because the spacecraft and the vast majority of the launch vehicle are reusable and affordable. But I agree it’s still only incremental. And nothing close to the scale and ambition of Apollo. Hopefully Starship will change that.
- avmich 6y ago
  > And nothing close to the scale and ambition of Apollo. I'd argue Apollo, as spacecraft, is left behind. Far behind, and the scale of today's works is way bigger. You can't compare Sno-Buggy - a towering automotive achievement of its time - with modern Toyotas in numbers, development resources spent, functional richness, versatility of uses. Apollo was different because it flew away from a low Earth orbit - a first for manned spacecrafts. And Starship maybe will fly even farther - qualitatively - than Apollo - in this sense it's a big step, yes. But making what was nearly impossible 60 years ago routine and affordable isn't unimportant or cheap.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Oh sure, but I think even Dragon won't make it quite routine. It's cheaper than Apollo per-seat by slightly better than a factor of 2 (Saturn Ib plus the Apollo command module was ~$500 million adjusted for inflation compared to ~220 million for Dragon Crew per launch), but the routineness is not much different than apollo during its prime. That's why Starship is the most important step. It's like Apollo in scale of the launch, but will be launched much more often. And the vehicle itself can be refueled, which means you can send ~100 people to the surface of the Moon and back instead of just 2-3... And perhaps can send people all the way to Mars. And for maybe a tenth the price of a Dragon run to LEO. THAT is transformative. Orders of magnitude more ambitious while being an order of magnitude cheaper per mission. Dragon is still just incremental, although probably a necessary step along that road.
    - avmich 6y ago
      > THAT is transformative. We may argue about what is transformative - first orbital flight, first flight above LEO, first lunar landing and first hand-off of expedition on a space station all are. From question "do we have progress?" we switched to "do we have big step up or not?". And if you look at achievement during 1960-s, all subsequent steps were incremental over previous, from technological point of view. Yet people managed to do something which wasn't done before - and to have a period in time, roughly 1960-s, when, if you compare what you had before that period and after, you have accumulated achievements which seem like a lot. Yes it's a lot. Yes it was built on top of what was possible by then - with a lot of efforts during 1960-s. Yes we plan to have similar situations soon :) . However - even though we don't have Starship yet, and no matter if Crew Dragon is needed for that (it is), we still have progress right now. Only instead comparing years 1960 and 1970, you have to compare 2005 and 2020. Shenzhou was a refined descendant of Soyuz, with corresponding limitations learned later, while Crew Dragon is a clean sheet implementation of what we know about capsule flight, a complex dance of engineering and economy. Discounting it as an insufficiently ambitious is a little like dismissing ITER just because it's not going to support itself economically, so can't be economically scaled. In other words, I'm not talking about Starship here, focusing on Crew Dragon.
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        It's fair to point out Dragon/F9 is an advanced vehicle that is improving the state of the art after about 50 years of stagnation. The change in sign from negative (stagnation) to strongly positive is worth noting, even if it's relatively incremental vs Starship.

The difference is roughly as between contemporary cars. Compare Chevy Impala of early 1960-s with today's Priuses. Of course this is just an analogy. We can study functional differences - while both Vostok and Crew Dragon can deliver a human to orbit and back, they differ a lot regarding how well they do that and what they can also do, in addition to the main functionality.

Robotbeat 6y ago

It’s progress because the spacecraft and the vast majority of the launch vehicle are reusable and affordable. But I agree it’s still only incremental. And nothing close to the scale and ambition of Apollo. Hopefully Starship will change that.

avmich 6y ago
> And nothing close to the scale and ambition of Apollo. I'd argue Apollo, as spacecraft, is left behind. Far behind, and the scale of today's works is way bigger. You can't compare Sno-Buggy - a towering automotive achievement of its time - with modern Toyotas in numbers, development resources spent, functional richness, versatility of uses. Apollo was different because it flew away from a low Earth orbit - a first for manned spacecrafts. And Starship maybe will fly even farther - qualitatively - than Apollo - in this sense it's a big step, yes. But making what was nearly impossible 60 years ago routine and affordable isn't unimportant or cheap.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Oh sure, but I think even Dragon won't make it quite routine. It's cheaper than Apollo per-seat by slightly better than a factor of 2 (Saturn Ib plus the Apollo command module was ~$500 million adjusted for inflation compared to ~220 million for Dragon Crew per launch), but the routineness is not much different than apollo during its prime. That's why Starship is the most important step. It's like Apollo in scale of the launch, but will be launched much more often. And the vehicle itself can be refueled, which means you can send ~100 people to the surface of the Moon and back instead of just 2-3... And perhaps can send people all the way to Mars. And for maybe a tenth the price of a Dragon run to LEO. THAT is transformative. Orders of magnitude more ambitious while being an order of magnitude cheaper per mission. Dragon is still just incremental, although probably a necessary step along that road.
  - avmich 6y ago
    > THAT is transformative. We may argue about what is transformative - first orbital flight, first flight above LEO, first lunar landing and first hand-off of expedition on a space station all are. From question "do we have progress?" we switched to "do we have big step up or not?". And if you look at achievement during 1960-s, all subsequent steps were incremental over previous, from technological point of view. Yet people managed to do something which wasn't done before - and to have a period in time, roughly 1960-s, when, if you compare what you had before that period and after, you have accumulated achievements which seem like a lot. Yes it's a lot. Yes it was built on top of what was possible by then - with a lot of efforts during 1960-s. Yes we plan to have similar situations soon :) . However - even though we don't have Starship yet, and no matter if Crew Dragon is needed for that (it is), we still have progress right now. Only instead comparing years 1960 and 1970, you have to compare 2005 and 2020. Shenzhou was a refined descendant of Soyuz, with corresponding limitations learned later, while Crew Dragon is a clean sheet implementation of what we know about capsule flight, a complex dance of engineering and economy. Discounting it as an insufficiently ambitious is a little like dismissing ITER just because it's not going to support itself economically, so can't be economically scaled. In other words, I'm not talking about Starship here, focusing on Crew Dragon.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      It's fair to point out Dragon/F9 is an advanced vehicle that is improving the state of the art after about 50 years of stagnation. The change in sign from negative (stagnation) to strongly positive is worth noting, even if it's relatively incremental vs Starship.