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Can you elaborate on “innovated on a scale existing space companies haven’t in decades...”? I’m not aware of anything they did that couldn’t have been done els
by Guest42 5y ago
Can you elaborate on “innovated on a scale existing space companies haven’t in decades...”? I’m not aware of anything they did that couldn’t have been done elsewhere provided the resources were dedicated and am curious of the significance. My position is more aligned with the parent post.
- sokoloff 5y agoReducing the cost of payload insertion by a factor of 100 qualifies in my book. People had transportation before Karl Benz and Henry Ford. I don’t think they did anything that couldn’t have been done elsewhere provided the resources were dedicated.
- ekianjo 5y agothe NASA has been blowing dozens of billions in the past 20 years and still has no rocket to show and certainly nothing reusable.
- throw0101a 5y ago> the NASA has … been throwing money at SpaceX since (at least) 2006: * https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/news/COTS_selection.html https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/news/COTS_selection.html The thing about R&D is that you do not know ahead of time what will work and what will fail. Some of NASA's programs failed and some have succeeded. But there was no way to know if SpaceX would be the winner, or SLS, or anything else. SpaceX itself nearly failed: * https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex-nearly-failed-itself-out-of-existence.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex... > … and certainly nothing reusable. Reusable was never done before (AFAICT). It turns out that it is actually technically possible and useful. But there was no way to know that ahead of time. It was a risk that SpaceX, and NASA by funding them, that just happened to work out.