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Technologically it very well might have been possible far, far earlier. The computer in Shuttle are very complex, more complex then what is needed for a simple
by nickik 5y ago
Technologically it very well might have been possible far, far earlier. The computer in Shuttle are very complex, more complex then what is needed for a simple Falcon 9 70s style.
NASA shackeled itself to Shuttle, a expensive failure of a project and from them on the basically didn't develop anything new for 3 decades.
The millitary if anything is where such thinking should have been happening. The went threw many iterations of rockets.
A few reasons why they never managed to go reusable. Reliance on solid boosters, once you have them reusability is not really practical.
The millitary also simply doesnt care much about cost. What they care about is reliability above all else.
And you would be suprised how much engineers buy into constraints. The reality is that after a while the status quo of the industry you work on is simply an assumed constraint. Nobody asked engineers the question 'how do you get 100 tons to orbit per week' or whatever.
As Musk puts it, the most difficult part is asking the right question. Nothing is as harmful as smart engineers spending lots of money and time answering the wrong question.
- fallingfrog 5y agoIt certainly makes you wonder, what other innovations could we have made decades ago, but nobody was willing to take the risk? Currently most of our innovation is directed towards computer systems for keeping track of people and data, which in many cases can be broadly characterized as systems of control. And that appears to be what our society prioritizes, whereas a company like SpaceX only comes along once in a blue moon. And Elon himself is sort of a fluke as he's a person who is both a child of wealth, and also has a curious mind and a knack for understanding engineering problems. There are lots of curious people with a knack for understanding engineering problems but most of them weren't born into money and of the ones that were, only Elon has emerged as willing to make SpaceX level risky investments. It makes sense; if you're that rich, you have no desire to genuinely innovate, since you're already set for life and by definition are one of the people who benefited from society being exactly as it is. Maybe that's the real takeaway here: the people at the top of society by definition benefited from things being as they are, therefore those people are the least likely to want innovations that might cause real change. Therefore to the extend that society is unequal, it is also unable to innovate. I wonder if you could put that hypothesis to the test with data.
- mateo1 5y agoThe reliability factor is always understated. When you have a project that didn't only cost more than a billion but also took more than 10 years to make you really the rocket thing to work the first time.