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Are you saying its behind schedule, or over budget, or under-delivering? Are you saying you think it should have been rushed?

VMG 15y ago
The Apollo program was announced in in 1961. The moon landing was in 1969.
- rplnt 15y ago
  Apollo was driven by politics. It had almost no budget limits. You really can't compare these two.
- yardie 15y ago
  During the Apollo program NASA's budget was 5% of the federal budget. Today it is less than .4%.
- mikeash 15y ago
  And the cost was staggering and the technology was never truly debugged. (Fun fact, Apollo 13 nearly became famous for a completely different reason, as resonance caused the rocket to come within seconds of tearing itself to pieces during the launch, only prevented by sheer luck when the massive vibrations tripped a fuel sensor and shut off the offending engine.)
sho_hn 15y ago
No, neither. I'm saying that compared to my recollections of rocketry history as well as news about recent activity in the commercial space, a timespan of 14 years until the first validation launch seems long considering the challenges the deliverable would seem to pose. I can of course readily speculate about many reasons about why this is so: - They may be doing higher-quality work or proceeding more cautiously than other projects with similar goals. - The rocket may have unique traits or capabilities that justify the development time despite the payload capacity being nothing eyebrow-raising. - The definition of "start of development" used by the author of the Wikipedia statement may not match my expectation, i.e. there may have been a long market analysis and conception stage before engineers actually got to work. - The project may not have enjoyed a steady level of activity for all of those 14 years. - Funding may have been lower than for comparable projects. - There could have been political, legal or financial problems ailing the project. - I may simply be wrong and 14 years is not a long time at all for this kind of project. And so on. Basically, I'm hoping for someone who knows the actual answer to share their insight.

VMG 15y ago

The Apollo program was announced in in 1961. The moon landing was in 1969.

rplnt 15y ago
Apollo was driven by politics. It had almost no budget limits. You really can't compare these two.
yardie 15y ago
During the Apollo program NASA's budget was 5% of the federal budget. Today it is less than .4%.
mikeash 15y ago
And the cost was staggering and the technology was never truly debugged. (Fun fact, Apollo 13 nearly became famous for a completely different reason, as resonance caused the rocket to come within seconds of tearing itself to pieces during the launch, only prevented by sheer luck when the massive vibrations tripped a fuel sensor and shut off the offending engine.)

sho_hn 15y ago

No, neither. I'm saying that compared to my recollections of rocketry history as well as news about recent activity in the commercial space, a timespan of 14 years until the first validation launch seems long considering the challenges the deliverable would seem to pose. I can of course readily speculate about many reasons about why this is so: - They may be doing higher-quality work or proceeding more cautiously than other projects with similar goals. - The rocket may have unique traits or capabilities that justify the development time despite the payload capacity being nothing eyebrow-raising. - The definition of "start of development" used by the author of the Wikipedia statement may not match my expectation, i.e. there may have been a long market analysis and conception stage before engineers actually got to work. - The project may not have enjoyed a steady level of activity for all of those 14 years. - Funding may have been lower than for comparable projects. - There could have been political, legal or financial problems ailing the project. - I may simply be wrong and 14 years is not a long time at all for this kind of project. And so on. Basically, I'm hoping for someone who knows the actual answer to share their insight.