11 ms·

I used to feel somewhat more this way, but after studying more history as well as living through 40+ years of the tech and other revolutions I actually am now n

by xoa 2y ago

I used to feel somewhat more this way, but after studying more history as well as living through 40+ years of the tech and other revolutions I actually am now not so sure. Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together. And how the pieces come together can change the course of history as well. In a modern version of that, take rocketry. Cheap high cadence medium and heavy lift, including significant real (vs paper) reusability that improved the economics, is not something that only became possible in 2016 and then inevitable that anyone would do. We could have been going that way fairly shortly after Apollo, in a timeline where we pursued projects like Sea Dragon or Nova and focused on economics instead of the pork barrel boondoggle of the Space Shuttle. Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again. So what Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented is not something I think you can just dismiss as "might have been created a few years later [and] the consequence would have been small". A few decades isn't a small thing, but even a few years isn't necessarily small during most of modern history. A few years would have been a big deal for the US if Russia still had a monopoly on getting humans to space for example when they launched their full scale invasion. SpaceX has revolutionized satellite comms as well, again not because of any radical tech change but just because being have stupendous history changing amounts of raw mass and cadence to work with for cheap allows whole new approaches. Quoting Ars, last year SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Now they've set a new light to follow and aren't slowing down. You can find endless examples once you start looking, both for good and for ill (awesome tech that died on the vine). I don't think our paths are remotely as inevitable as it has become trendy to claim. It's perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that yes, of course everyone stands on the shoulders of giants. But that doesn't change the fact that doing that standing is hard work and can be key to actually changing the world.

zimpenfish 2y ago
> Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again. Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
- db48x 2y ago
  We certainly do know that while the Apollo program was still in progress NASA was developing the nuclear rockets that would make Mars missions feasible. Think weeks of travel time instead of months, and much larger payload fractions. If you want to talk about funding cuts, talk about Nixon. The Commercial Crew program came decades later after the failure of the Shuttle program, when it was revealed just how dangerous the they were.
  - diffuse_l 2y ago
    It was reaveled how dangerous it was around 1986, after the Challenger disater. There were too many incentives to ignore it. Commercial crew would probably not come to be (at least not in its current form) if SpaceX wasn't around to prove that it's possible
    - db48x 2y ago
      It took another accident before anyone took the danger seriously enough to ground the Shuttle.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  SpaceX has made a lot of real advancements while delivering real launches. You're thinking of Boeing.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    Space in the US has always been extremely political. SpaceX is a more recent kind of politicisation which happens to be palatable to the current neoliberal orthodoxy, which follows the usual cycle of "break something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is." If it had been left to the engineers in 1970s NASA and not to anti-science Republican cranks and crooks like Nixon and Proxmire, we would absolutely would have had a moon base and Mars landings long before now.
tzs 2y ago
> Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?
- db48x 2y ago
  An orbital craft is moving at hypersonic speeds, which is a especially tricky when going backwards. Things moving through fluids tend to want to flip over so that the part with the highest drag is at the rear, so that drag is minimized. Meanwhile the engine bay of a rocket is not generally shaped to have low drag when pushing through the air.
  - tzs 2y ago
    Wouldn't any spacecraft designed to return to Earth non-destructively, regardless of whether it was going to land vertically or land like an airplane or land with a parachute, first slow down to subsonic speeds before getting to the phase of the flight where the landing system is invoked?
    - immibis 2y ago
      It slows down by burning stuff and making hot stuff go out one end. That end is the one worse for air drag, because it has all the bits where the hot stuff comes out.
    - db48x 2y ago
      No. Go watch a Falcon 9 booster recovery <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-_90o1KLkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-_90o1KLkM> on Youtube; you’ll see that when it starts its landing burn it is ~5 miles up and flying engines first towards the ground at ~1300 miles per hour.
- xoa 2y ago
  >Why is it important to note that it was not orbital? Orbital is what actually provides any significant economic value. But the nature of the Rocket Equation, effects with atmosphere, and how those interact with the limits of our material science means that there is an absolutely enormous gulf between a sounding rocket and getting to orbital velocity and back again. All of that is what makes it so hard but it's also required to be of any real practical use. So the DC-X was a noteworthy historical milestone/demo and test bed but going from there to something like the Falcon 9 let alone Starship takes an tremendous amount of further innovation and engineering (and investment of course). The new engine work alone SpaceX has done is a hufe deal and is what defines the envelope for the rest of the system.
riehwvfbk 2y ago
The point is, the archetypal inventor is someone who has a unique flash of insight that only they could have had. Your example is of something different: that with enough funding and smart people working on a problem, great things can be achieved. Elon didn't personally have almost any of the insights, but he did supply the vision and funding.
- gus_massa 2y ago
  He supplied a lighting rod for negativity. The first few launches were very difficult. A NASA project with 10 crashes would have been destroyed by the press and congress. The superpower of Elon is to shield the technical team from the negativity, pipe it to null and post "close but no ciggar".
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    NASA's very early launches were hardly more reliable. But there was always an overlap with ICBM development and national defence. So reliability improved quickly, and one of the goals of the space program was to showcase that reliability. Once Apollo was running the success rate was 100%, with no boosters lost - an incredible achievement, not just of tech but of project management. NASA of the day didn't need shielding, because it was already doing the job with no excuses.
    - db48x 2y ago
      Well, only if you ignore Apollo 1. Overall Apollo was incredibly successful, but not 100%.
    - gus_massa 2y ago
      At that time they didn't have TV news channels that can repeat the explosion 24 hour a day. Also the space race and cold war was a good shield, if someone complain s/he was accused of being an evil communist spy trying to destroy America. I think in he previos programs they had unmanned missions, but once they reached Apollo they (always?) have to use manned missions because docking was not automated. Once you have persons inside the rockets they should not explode, so you must be extra careful with the design. > because it was already doing the job with no excuses. We will have to wait until someone makes another cheap reusable rocket to know how hard it is to design them without exploding a few of them. The move fast and break think applied to rocket science may be a brilliant strategy or a stupid excuse, but we will not know until someone else try. (I'm not counting the Space Shuttle. It was not reusable, it was expansively refurnishable after month of work.)
belter 2y ago
> Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented Why do you keep giving engineering credit to a Paypal Billionaire? By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin? I guess none other than opening a check book?
- yetihehe 2y ago
  > By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin? Why didn't BlueOrigin surpass SpaceX? Is it only a funding issue?
  - asddubs 2y ago
    wait, do you think the reason is that elon musk personally helped invent stuff?
    - yetihehe 2y ago
      No, but if it's not a difference of "Musk(programmer) vs Bezos(businessman)" I would like to know why other companies or leaders with a lot of money didn't have such success. Is it only a size of bank account? To me it looks like a ceo or a leader of company has more correlation with success than "just a lot of money". My take - a CEO that is technical enough to decide on technical matters in inevitable arguments over what direction to choose is better for tech company than a business CEO that only looks for "what is cheaper in the short term".
      - db48x 2y ago
        Yea, there are hundreds or even thousands of billionaires. Only one of them has developed a successful orbital launch company. That’s not exactly a high base rate.
        jeltz 2y ago
        And how many have tried? Not more than 5 would be my guess. We do not have enough data to make a conclusion.
zamadatix 2y ago
I think there is also a bifurcation to be had on inventions which take billions of dollars into a business to R&D and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per test vs inventions one mildly wealthy (or less) average individual can reasonably cover the investment of. The former is less about the invention making and more about the funding gathering.
throw0101c 2y ago
> Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together. Perhaps invention is slightly different, but in the empirical sciences there's a bunch of stuff that occurred at roughly the same time: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery Science and technology are closely related, as the latter builds on the former, and so it is often the case that sometimes a little bit of luck / timing determines who is "first", e.g. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray
Zak 2y ago
I think we can say that a successful airplane was inevitable in the early 20th century because of the other work being done in the field at the time. Other designs were getting close, but didn't quite have the necessary combination of power to weight and lift to drag. The most important innovation from the Wrights was the realization that aerodynamic roll control was necessary; it's harder to say how many years would have been needed for someone else to try that. That's not to say the same thing is true for any other invention or technological advance.
sumtechguy 2y ago
I used to watch a show called Connections. Things can exist in other fields that cross over and make other fields absolutely ignite with interesting possibilities. SpaceX is taking existing tech and rebuilding it up from ground up principles. It is the method they are applying to all of his businesses. Get something working. Then go back and throw everything out until it stops working. Then put that thing back. Then throw out more. The idea is if you still work perfectly fine without something you did not need it. Following the optimization method of 'the most optimal thing is the thing that is not there.' It is what took Tesla from a bespoke 1-5 cars per year company to the capability to build thousands per week. It is a brutal painful process that works.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  It's increasingly debatable that the process actually does work.
- immibis 2y ago
  The idea you are specifying is called Muntzing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing - named after a CEO who supposedly made the poorest TVs on the market, but also the cheapest. Which left him with lots of money to spend on marketing those poor-quality TVs to people who they would not work for, who had to pay for their own return shipping.
- coliveira 2y ago
  The capability of building thousands of cars per week is quite old. You may be referring to EVs, but even in that category we have BYD that is knocking competitors out the park.
DrFalkyn 2y ago
The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire Archimedes even demonstrated the principle of heated water caising a sphere to rotate But there was little use for it, without substantial investment in other areas. Horses for land transportand human rowers for ships were just cheaper and more practical It would take another 1500 years before Watt found its use for a pump
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  FWIW, there was plenty of use for pumps earlier on - in mining. But muscle power, then water power, was sufficient. Part of the steam engine's success was how it contributed to itself - it helped mine coal that would fuel it, and that would fuel furnaces in which steel was made, some of that steel going into... making more engines - and all of that moved around by means of steam power. *Factorio vibes intensify* You had to have enough pieces together: demand for coal and steel and moving them distances, sustained long enough to exhaust simple options, and become a problem the steam engine could solve. It was then that the steam engine turned this into self-reinforcing loop, and kickstarted the modern world.
  - ckozlowski 2y ago
    Your discussion with DrF jogged my memory a bit. There was a discussion on this topic some time ago (I'm fuzzy on when) that went into detail about how there needed to be a specific use case and demand for this. I'm trying to remember the blog, but a search on HN yielded this: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-76c https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... I think this is the blog in question, and the most relevant part. If something else comes to me, I'll share it here.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    That exponential character is what we are seeing with computers too. Better computers increase both the supply and the demand for even more.
  - ashoeafoot 2y ago
    The steam engine came about due to the spread of shipworms. Ships need copper shielding against that, thus mining deep, thus industrial revolution. First comes the demand. Which came about by the merchant fleet of the British empire.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
GP is talking about something else, and arguably in agreement with your view: for a technology to come about and stick, you need a perfect storm: all the pieces being available and a source of continued demand for it. The former you need for an invention to be made; the latter you need for it to survive - to continue being made and to spread worldwide. WRT. rocketry, this is a story of technology getting almost, but not quite there - it was all evolving at a rapid pace, until suddenly demand disappeared. It's not that demand for rockets wasn't there at all - just not at the price point which designs from the 80s/90s commanded What Elon did with SpaceX, was to focus on dropping the price. That involved revisiting the reusable boosters idea, which didn't pan out then because they didn't have to worry about money as much. It got perfected and productized by SpaceX now, because it was a road to cheaper launches - and they got them cheap enough to meet the existing demand (and create more of it).
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  Also for rocketry the established players didn't want to majorly reduce the cost because they had government monopolies. Innovators dilemma.
xbmcuser 2y ago
This is why I say people that say private capitalism is what moves the world tech forward are wrong. From Rockets, Nuclear, Robots, Internet, Cars, Planes, Semi Conductors, Satellites all these came about from government investment in loss making technology or by heavily subsidizing the production for war until it reached profitability.
- marcusverus 2y ago
  I mean, both have a big role to play. You mention rocket tech, which is a perfect example of the strengths and weaknesses of public and private enterprise. Public enterprise can be great because it enables societies to leverage huge amounts of capital (at one point, the US was spending 4% of GDP on the Apollo program each year--the equivalent of $1 Trillion/year today) to accomplish goals that are beyond the capacity of private industry at the time. It suffers from being totally divorced from the normal constraints of economy, and so tends to way overspend (4% of GDP is frankly insane) and to get stuck at local maxima (see SLS). Private enterprise is basically the opposite. It can never match the government in terms of spending big to pull tech forward by decades--the profit margin doesn't really work that way. But it lavishly rewards the efficient allocation of capital, which (so long as there is meaningful competition) creates a drive to constantly improve tech. It's painful to think about where rocket tech would be without the recent advances born of private capital!
diego_moita 2y ago
> You can find endless examples once you start looking My favorite examples are gunpowder, the printing press. Both were known by the Chinese and Koreans for thousand years before the Europeans. However, it was the Europeans that began using gunpowder in handheld guns (Chinese used it for fireworks) and combined the printing press with metallic moveable types and oily ink, making it far more efficient. Also: how much James Watt improved the already existing steam engine.
Manabu-eo 2y ago
> the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Surveyor 1 was the first automated vertical soft-landing rocket AFAIK, in 1966. DC-X was the first using turbo-pump engines.

by xoa 2y ago

zimpenfish 2y ago

> Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again. Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.

db48x 2y ago
We certainly do know that while the Apollo program was still in progress NASA was developing the nuclear rockets that would make Mars missions feasible. Think weeks of travel time instead of months, and much larger payload fractions. If you want to talk about funding cuts, talk about Nixon. The Commercial Crew program came decades later after the failure of the Shuttle program, when it was revealed just how dangerous the they were.
- diffuse_l 2y ago
  It was reaveled how dangerous it was around 1986, after the Challenger disater. There were too many incentives to ignore it. Commercial crew would probably not come to be (at least not in its current form) if SpaceX wasn't around to prove that it's possible
  - db48x 2y ago
    It took another accident before anyone took the danger seriously enough to ground the Shuttle.
robertlagrant 2y ago
SpaceX has made a lot of real advancements while delivering real launches. You're thinking of Boeing.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  Space in the US has always been extremely political. SpaceX is a more recent kind of politicisation which happens to be palatable to the current neoliberal orthodoxy, which follows the usual cycle of "break something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is." If it had been left to the engineers in 1970s NASA and not to anti-science Republican cranks and crooks like Nixon and Proxmire, we would absolutely would have had a moon base and Mars landings long before now.

tzs 2y ago

> Skipping forward, the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Why is it important to note that it was not orbital?

db48x 2y ago
An orbital craft is moving at hypersonic speeds, which is a especially tricky when going backwards. Things moving through fluids tend to want to flip over so that the part with the highest drag is at the rear, so that drag is minimized. Meanwhile the engine bay of a rocket is not generally shaped to have low drag when pushing through the air.
- tzs 2y ago
  Wouldn't any spacecraft designed to return to Earth non-destructively, regardless of whether it was going to land vertically or land like an airplane or land with a parachute, first slow down to subsonic speeds before getting to the phase of the flight where the landing system is invoked?
  - immibis 2y ago
    It slows down by burning stuff and making hot stuff go out one end. That end is the one worse for air drag, because it has all the bits where the hot stuff comes out.
  - db48x 2y ago
    No. Go watch a Falcon 9 booster recovery <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-_90o1KLkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-_90o1KLkM> on Youtube; you’ll see that when it starts its landing burn it is ~5 miles up and flying engines first towards the ground at ~1300 miles per hour.
xoa 2y ago
>Why is it important to note that it was not orbital? Orbital is what actually provides any significant economic value. But the nature of the Rocket Equation, effects with atmosphere, and how those interact with the limits of our material science means that there is an absolutely enormous gulf between a sounding rocket and getting to orbital velocity and back again. All of that is what makes it so hard but it's also required to be of any real practical use. So the DC-X was a noteworthy historical milestone/demo and test bed but going from there to something like the Falcon 9 let alone Starship takes an tremendous amount of further innovation and engineering (and investment of course). The new engine work alone SpaceX has done is a hufe deal and is what defines the envelope for the rest of the system.

riehwvfbk 2y ago

The point is, the archetypal inventor is someone who has a unique flash of insight that only they could have had. Your example is of something different: that with enough funding and smart people working on a problem, great things can be achieved. Elon didn't personally have almost any of the insights, but he did supply the vision and funding.

gus_massa 2y ago
He supplied a lighting rod for negativity. The first few launches were very difficult. A NASA project with 10 crashes would have been destroyed by the press and congress. The superpower of Elon is to shield the technical team from the negativity, pipe it to null and post "close but no ciggar".
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  NASA's very early launches were hardly more reliable. But there was always an overlap with ICBM development and national defence. So reliability improved quickly, and one of the goals of the space program was to showcase that reliability. Once Apollo was running the success rate was 100%, with no boosters lost - an incredible achievement, not just of tech but of project management. NASA of the day didn't need shielding, because it was already doing the job with no excuses.
  - db48x 2y ago
    Well, only if you ignore Apollo 1. Overall Apollo was incredibly successful, but not 100%.
  - gus_massa 2y ago
    At that time they didn't have TV news channels that can repeat the explosion 24 hour a day. Also the space race and cold war was a good shield, if someone complain s/he was accused of being an evil communist spy trying to destroy America. I think in he previos programs they had unmanned missions, but once they reached Apollo they (always?) have to use manned missions because docking was not automated. Once you have persons inside the rockets they should not explode, so you must be extra careful with the design. > because it was already doing the job with no excuses. We will have to wait until someone makes another cheap reusable rocket to know how hard it is to design them without exploding a few of them. The move fast and break think applied to rocket science may be a brilliant strategy or a stupid excuse, but we will not know until someone else try. (I'm not counting the Space Shuttle. It was not reusable, it was expansively refurnishable after month of work.)

belter 2y ago

> Elon Musk and SpaceX ultimately invented Why do you keep giving engineering credit to a Paypal Billionaire? By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin? I guess none other than opening a check book?

yetihehe 2y ago
> By that logic, how much invention did Bezos do with BlueOrigin? Why didn't BlueOrigin surpass SpaceX? Is it only a funding issue?
- asddubs 2y ago
  wait, do you think the reason is that elon musk personally helped invent stuff?
  - yetihehe 2y ago
    No, but if it's not a difference of "Musk(programmer) vs Bezos(businessman)" I would like to know why other companies or leaders with a lot of money didn't have such success. Is it only a size of bank account? To me it looks like a ceo or a leader of company has more correlation with success than "just a lot of money". My take - a CEO that is technical enough to decide on technical matters in inevitable arguments over what direction to choose is better for tech company than a business CEO that only looks for "what is cheaper in the short term".
    - db48x 2y ago
      Yea, there are hundreds or even thousands of billionaires. Only one of them has developed a successful orbital launch company. That’s not exactly a high base rate.
      - jeltz 2y ago
        And how many have tried? Not more than 5 would be my guess. We do not have enough data to make a conclusion.

zamadatix 2y ago

I think there is also a bifurcation to be had on inventions which take billions of dollars into a business to R&D and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per test vs inventions one mildly wealthy (or less) average individual can reasonably cover the investment of. The former is less about the invention making and more about the funding gathering.

throw0101c 2y ago

> Yes absolutely, environment makes a difference, but it also looks pretty clear that the raw tech can exist for something for a very, very long time without anyone putting the pieces together. Perhaps invention is slightly different, but in the empirical sciences there's a bunch of stuff that occurred at roughly the same time: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery Science and technology are closely related, as the latter builds on the former, and so it is often the case that sometimes a little bit of luck / timing determines who is "first", e.g. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Gray

Zak 2y ago

I think we can say that a successful airplane was inevitable in the early 20th century because of the other work being done in the field at the time. Other designs were getting close, but didn't quite have the necessary combination of power to weight and lift to drag. The most important innovation from the Wrights was the realization that aerodynamic roll control was necessary; it's harder to say how many years would have been needed for someone else to try that. That's not to say the same thing is true for any other invention or technological advance.

sumtechguy 2y ago

I used to watch a show called Connections. Things can exist in other fields that cross over and make other fields absolutely ignite with interesting possibilities. SpaceX is taking existing tech and rebuilding it up from ground up principles. It is the method they are applying to all of his businesses. Get something working. Then go back and throw everything out until it stops working. Then put that thing back. Then throw out more. The idea is if you still work perfectly fine without something you did not need it. Following the optimization method of 'the most optimal thing is the thing that is not there.' It is what took Tesla from a bespoke 1-5 cars per year company to the capability to build thousands per week. It is a brutal painful process that works.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
It's increasingly debatable that the process actually does work.
immibis 2y ago
The idea you are specifying is called Muntzing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing - named after a CEO who supposedly made the poorest TVs on the market, but also the cheapest. Which left him with lots of money to spend on marketing those poor-quality TVs to people who they would not work for, who had to pay for their own return shipping.
coliveira 2y ago
The capability of building thousands of cars per week is quite old. You may be referring to EVs, but even in that category we have BYD that is knocking competitors out the park.

DrFalkyn 2y ago

The tech necessary for steam engines was available by the late Roman empire Archimedes even demonstrated the principle of heated water caising a sphere to rotate But there was little use for it, without substantial investment in other areas. Horses for land transportand human rowers for ships were just cheaper and more practical It would take another 1500 years before Watt found its use for a pump

TeMPOraL 2y ago
FWIW, there was plenty of use for pumps earlier on - in mining. But muscle power, then water power, was sufficient. Part of the steam engine's success was how it contributed to itself - it helped mine coal that would fuel it, and that would fuel furnaces in which steel was made, some of that steel going into... making more engines - and all of that moved around by means of steam power. *Factorio vibes intensify* You had to have enough pieces together: demand for coal and steel and moving them distances, sustained long enough to exhaust simple options, and become a problem the steam engine could solve. It was then that the steam engine turned this into self-reinforcing loop, and kickstarted the modern world.
- ckozlowski 2y ago
  Your discussion with DrF jogged my memory a bit. There was a discussion on this topic some time ago (I'm fuzzy on when) that went into detail about how there needed to be a specific use case and demand for this. I'm trying to remember the blog, but a search on HN yielded this: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-76c https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-... I think this is the blog in question, and the most relevant part. If something else comes to me, I'll share it here.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  That exponential character is what we are seeing with computers too. Better computers increase both the supply and the demand for even more.
- ashoeafoot 2y ago
  The steam engine came about due to the spread of shipworms. Ships need copper shielding against that, thus mining deep, thus industrial revolution. First comes the demand. Which came about by the merchant fleet of the British empire.

TeMPOraL 2y ago

GP is talking about something else, and arguably in agreement with your view: for a technology to come about and stick, you need a perfect storm: all the pieces being available and a source of continued demand for it. The former you need for an invention to be made; the latter you need for it to survive - to continue being made and to spread worldwide. WRT. rocketry, this is a story of technology getting almost, but not quite there - it was all evolving at a rapid pace, until suddenly demand disappeared. It's not that demand for rockets wasn't there at all - just not at the price point which designs from the 80s/90s commanded What Elon did with SpaceX, was to focus on dropping the price. That involved revisiting the reusable boosters idea, which didn't pan out then because they didn't have to worry about money as much. It got perfected and productized by SpaceX now, because it was a road to cheaper launches - and they got them cheap enough to meet the existing demand (and create more of it).

datadrivenangel 2y ago
Also for rocketry the established players didn't want to majorly reduce the cost because they had government monopolies. Innovators dilemma.

xbmcuser 2y ago

This is why I say people that say private capitalism is what moves the world tech forward are wrong. From Rockets, Nuclear, Robots, Internet, Cars, Planes, Semi Conductors, Satellites all these came about from government investment in loss making technology or by heavily subsidizing the production for war until it reached profitability.

marcusverus 2y ago
I mean, both have a big role to play. You mention rocket tech, which is a perfect example of the strengths and weaknesses of public and private enterprise. Public enterprise can be great because it enables societies to leverage huge amounts of capital (at one point, the US was spending 4% of GDP on the Apollo program each year--the equivalent of $1 Trillion/year today) to accomplish goals that are beyond the capacity of private industry at the time. It suffers from being totally divorced from the normal constraints of economy, and so tends to way overspend (4% of GDP is frankly insane) and to get stuck at local maxima (see SLS). Private enterprise is basically the opposite. It can never match the government in terms of spending big to pull tech forward by decades--the profit margin doesn't really work that way. But it lavishly rewards the efficient allocation of capital, which (so long as there is meaningful competition) creates a drive to constantly improve tech. It's painful to think about where rocket tech would be without the recent advances born of private capital!

diego_moita 2y ago

> You can find endless examples once you start looking My favorite examples are gunpowder, the printing press. Both were known by the Chinese and Koreans for thousand years before the Europeans. However, it was the Europeans that began using gunpowder in handheld guns (Chinese used it for fireworks) and combined the printing press with metallic moveable types and oily ink, making it far more efficient. Also: how much James Watt improved the already existing steam engine.

Manabu-eo 2y ago

> the basic controls of fully automated vertical landing were directly demo'd in a real flying 1/3 scale test bed (though important to note not an orbital one) with the DC-X in 1993. Surveyor 1 was the first automated vertical soft-landing rocket AFAIK, in 1966. DC-X was the first using turbo-pump engines.