Why are people impressed with SpaceX?
Why are people impressed with SpaceX?
So I've heard and seen the newest launch, and I thought for a private firm it seemed cool they were able to do it on their own, but I'm scratching my head that people are gushing about this as some hail mary.
I get the engineering required is staggering when it comes to these rocket tests, but NASA and other big space agencies have already done rocket tests and exploring bits of the moon which still astounds me to this day.
Is it because it's not a multi billion government institution? When I tell colleagues about NASA doing stuff like this yeaaaars ago they're like "Yea yea but this is different it's crazy bro"
Can anyone help me understand? Any SpaceX or Tesla fans here?
Disclaimer: Fuck Elon Musk and all the shady shit he's been pulling off.
That said, this is one of the most impressive things I've ever seen in terms of the potential it holds to shape the future.
Up until 5 short years ago we had:
- No main booster recovery
- No rocket nearly as powerful as this one
- No successful flight of a full-flow stage engine
- Nobody even considering the catch with chopsticks thing
- No private company testing super heavy lift vehicles (BO is about to enter the chat as well)
- No push for reusability at all
This was all built on top of the incredible engineering of NASA, but this one launch today has all of the above ticked.
This is like making the first aeroplane that's able to land and be flown again. SpaceX uses this example as well, like, imagine how expensive any plane ticket would have to be if you had to build a brand new A380 every single time people wanted to fly and then crashing it into the sea.
Going to space is EXPENSIVE. If this program succeeds it will both massively reduce the cost to space and spin off hundreds of companies looking to do the same in various ways.
Look at any new rocket currently in development, they all include some level of reusability in the design and that's all thanks to the incredible engineers of SpaceX paving the way, first with Falcon 9 and now with Starship.
We're talking industrial revolution levels of progress and new frontiers in our lifetimes, which is very, very exciting.
I hate Musk and his personal everything, but Like SpaceX. However, when people gush about reusability, they seem to forget the 135 Space Shuttle missions (2 fatal failures , yes.). All done with 5 vehicles. Yes expensive etc, but truly amazing.
Also, I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary. Impressive? Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.
Imagine NASA crashing 4 Shuttles before getting landing right. There’d be no NASA by now.
Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.
NASA spent about 50 Billion today-dollars developing (not launching) the shuttle program and that went to private contractors (Boeing, Lockheed, United Space, etc.) Starship has a long way to go to hit those numbers.
I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary
Really? Nothing? Many people said what Falcon 9 now does on a regular basis could not be done. No one was even trying. The closest plans were still going to land horizontally and went nowhere. Now, you have to explain why you're not landing your booster, and what your plans are to fix that going forward: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/international/2024/09/11/china-wants-to-replace-jeff-bezos-as-musks-greatest-space-threat/
They quite literally revolutionized the space industry in terms of the cost to launch to orbit.
Imagine NASA crashing 4 Shuttles before getting landing right. There’d be no NASA by now.
Yet another way they've revolutionized the industry. Almost everyone is doing expendable tests now so that they can move forward quickly. Columbia started construction in 1975, launched for the first time in 1981. When they launched it, it was a fully decked out space shuttle and they put the whole thing on the line - including two astronauts. Imagine NASA trying to do that now. They'd be grounded so hard they'd be jealous of Mankind having a table to land on.
Like SpaceX. However, when people gush about reusability, they seem to forget the 135 Space Shuttle missions (2 fatal failures , yes.). All done with 5 vehicles. Yes expensive etc, but truly amazing.
The Space Shuttle was a marvel of engineering. But while it was reusable, it wasn't actually good at it. Reusability was supposed to bring down cost and turnaround time and it did neither. And not just that, it was actually much more expensive than competing expendable rockets. Plus, it had lots of other issues like being dangerous as fuck. You couldn't abort at all for major parts of the ascent and there was the whole issue with the fragile heat protection tiles, both of which caused fatalities.
I think part of the reason why people aren't impressed by the Shuttle anymore is because it flew 135 missions. It's 40 year old technology. And it's not like SpaceX are just doing the same thing again 40 years later, they're reusing their rockets in a completely different way, which no one else had done before. And in doing so they seem to be avoiding most of the disadvantages that came with the Shuttle's design.
Also, I really don’t find anything SpaceX is doing revolutionary. Impressive? Yes, but it’s essentially incremental engineering, made possible by ginormous funding, including NASA money, and a private company doing things that NASA can-t politically afford.
Sure, I wouldn't say that no one else could do this with a similar amount of money (and the will to actually do it). Whether you want to call it revolutionary or not is subjective, but they're definitely innovating a lot more than any other large player in spaceflight. The Falcon 9 is a huge step forward for rocket reusability and SpaceX have also been the first to fly a full-flow staged combustion engine as well as the most powerful rocket ever. They're making spaceflight exciting again after like 40 years of stagnation and I think that's what resonates with people.
The space shuttle wasn't as reusable as it was claimed to be.
Each airframe required massive refurbishment after every flight.
And the "crashes" you're talking about were part of the project process, articles that were never going to be any more than test objects to begin with.
NASA crashed a lot of stuff, unintentionally. Three off of the top of my head, killed 15 astronauts, all which were preventable (not to mention the launch pad failures getting to Apollo).
NASA/NACA/Air Force crashed a lot of stuff along the way.
Ffs they knew Columbia had a tile problem, and said "it'll be OK". They knew it had been too cold for the booster seals on Discovery, and launched anyway.
The space shuttle was technically reusable, but not in a way that was beneficial to anyone. The time and cost of refurbishing the shuttle after every launch was so much they may as well have built a brand new disposable rocket for each mission.
SpaceX may have built the first reusable rocket that actually saves money
The shuttle was reusable in the same way a soyuz capsule is. And NASA very much crashed shuttle prototypes on the way.
A bit of a timeline correction. The falcon 9 started landing succesfully in 2016. So 8 years ago but your argument still stands.
That can't be right! 2016 was just.... Fuck I'm getting old so fast
no rocket as powerful as this one.
So I'm confused on this because people still seem to be using Starships's old estimates of 100 tons to LEO orbit, which the SLS can put 145 tons to LEO.
Then 6 months ago Musk got on stage and updated the specs to Say that Starships's current design can only do 40-50 tons.
This feels awfully familiar for anyone that's seen early Tesla specs/presentations/promises and I can't help but wonder as to the validity of everyone saying SpaceX is mostly insulated from Musk's "influence."
To be very honest even if Starship is able to only lift 50 tons, which I'm sure they'll be able to hit 100/150 tons eventually. The huge difference in cost would easily cover the extra times Starship would have to fly, compared to SLS. Considering each flight of a SLS will be around 4 billion dollars.
I think they mean the "superheavy" (somehow a more stupid name than starship) booster rocket is the most powerful. I'm pretty sure by thrust metrics it is. It's just that the superheavy-starship system can't put much up in LEO because the starship is huge and heavy on its own.
If you put an expendable second stage on top of the superheavy booster instead of a starship it could put a lot more up to LEO.
The Saturn 5 was able to lift 141t to LEO.
The Space shuttle was reusable.
The Saturn V could lift 141t to LEO...once. Also it'll be at least another 5 years before we reach a stable max power version of Starship.
For example the Falcon 9 v1.0 first flew in 2010 and the current Block 5 version first flew in 2018 with more than double the LEO capacity when fully expendable.
If they configure Starship as fully expendable it can lift 250t to LEO (per SpaceX, so grain of salt there to be fair).
As for the shuttle, I love it to bits and I'm sad it had to be grounded. It was refurbishable but not really reusable and the massive liquid fuel tank was discarded in each flight.
My guy they just caught an object falling from space using a pair of giant chopsticks
They caught a building, with a building holding chopsticks.
https://youtu.be/b28zbsnk-48?t=412
That thing is about 70 meters long and weights 300 tons and some.
Technically not from space since the lower stage never made it past the Karman line, which is 100km above sea level.
It reached the altitude of 96km, not space but not far either.
Because they are impressive in the way NASA was. Which is the problem - we should be doing this as a nation and not subsidizing whatever a billionaire fancies at the moment.
Exactly. It’s concerning that a private individual is allowed to do this, much less without government competition. It’s like we’ve forgotten that the boosters that got us to the moon were the same missiles that terrorized Britain.
Yes. It's down right scary to think about what the consequences of private ownership will mean.
In best case it will turn into a profitable business which means burning a shit ton of fuel in the atmosphere and leaving tons of garbage in orbit.
Yes it's impressive that it's possible, but is it less impressive if it means screwing up the option for others to launch anything in 50 years just because the richest man on earth right now wanted to earn more money.
It's a small step for a large corporation, but it's a large step backwards for humanity.
I'd rather see new technologies like the slingshot launches becoming successful than seeing SpaceX launching the same old dirty rockets over and over for profit.
I hate Elon just as much as the next guy, but pretending that this wasn’t a marvel of engineering is really disingenuous. People with intelligence beyond my comprehension made that a reality, and just because the company had his face on it, it doesn’t make it any less impressive
I've seen so many people grudgingly pretending what they saw wasn't one of the coolest fucking things they've seen all year all because they hate Musk. Like, you know he's not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right? By all accounts he's more of a hindrance and these amazing fears of engineering have been accomplished despite him, not because of him.
I personally don't really care how big of a douche Musk is, as long as he's willing to fund these kinds of things.
So I was teaching some kids snowboarding, one kid started talking to me about musk on the chairlift. He tells me that musk is the greatest engineer to ever live. I say that he's really more of a business man buying up companies. Kid is not convinced. I tell him that the only engineering that musk may have done was software engineering on PayPal. Kid thinks that's great support of his claim.
Adults and 11 year olds are pretty much the same, so I would say there's lots of people that think musk is a super genius. Probably a dwindling amount, but there's a lot of people on earth.
He bought co-founder status at Paypal too IIRC. He was ousted in part because he wanted to rename it "x.com". Weird that.
Unfortunately, a lot of smart people are under his spell too. I had to listen to the CEO of a medium sized company wax poetic about how he's a super genius and the greatest boon to human ingenuity in a century, desperately trying to hold my tongue as I rolled my eyes into the back of my skull.
I think he's an okay businessman. That's about as much praise as I'm willing to afford him. He's definitely charismatic enough to convince a room full of investors that the ideas he's pitching are worthwhile. Part of that is that his passion for these projects are genuine, and when you put somebody in a room with a passionate guy, the enthusiasm tends to rub off on them just a little.
Most of his investments that garnered him his wealth are just him being at the right place at the right time. Getting in on PayPal when Ecommerce was in it's infancy and partnering with Ebay to take advantage of shopaholics who just couldn't help themselves. Buying his way into Tesla right when EVs were primed to take off and pushing hard for an economy class variant that could be mass produced rapidly (in an already-made factory that Toyota closed down, no less!). Founding SpaceX and pouring a shit ton of his own money into rocket and aeronautics R&D right around the time the U.S. Government was looking for cheap contractors to take over the space program. I think the only project he miscalculated on was buying Twitter for way too much money when social media was really starting to stagnate.
His politics are fucking weird, though. Him being a Trump nutter is really not helping his "I'm a genius" image. I find his personality to be pretty repugnant. I already didn't like him because back in the early days of Tesla he pushed all the management to essentially become slavedrivers for the line workers. I live in California near the plant and I had friends who worked there in production that got nearly worked to death, extreme overtime and weekend shifts, few breaks, the only saving grace was the above average pay that kind of kept them trapped in that hell of a job for way too long. Then the whole Thai soccer team incident happened and I was so over him. Haven't heard anything about him since that has made me feel like he deserves to be the richest cunt in the fucking universe.
these amazing fears of engineering
😱
Like, you know he’s not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right
Not everybody does. I've seen some threads, mostly on insta, where people were fallomg over themselves to get on their fucking knees to slob on Elon's nob. I get that the average insta user isn't the brightest, but people like that do exist.
And it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because there is a chance that the hard work of the engineers, laborers, and Shotwell will be used for Elon's fame throughout history.
So yeah, fuck Elon. The tech is cool as fuck though.
What did people see that was so cool?
I personally don't really care how big of a douche Musk is, as long as he's willing to fund these kinds of things.
He's not funding this, dude. We are. Space X gets massive government contracts and subsidies. The rest comes from income streams like Starlink.
Catching starship booster was pretty fucking cool.
Like, you know he’s not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right?
Just don't look up who made the design changes to stainless steel, aerodynamic flaps or tower capture.
you know he’s not personally involved in the design or manufacture of these things right?
He actually is. Everyday astronaut has done several interviews with him and the dude knows about rockets and engineering.
True, he appears to be closely involved and does seem to know what he talks about. Especially compared to jeff bezos lol.
He's the chief rocket designer as well as chief technology officer. He's deeply involved and is well regarded as an incredible engineer
If you ignore Musk for a moment, it is impressive. Maybe not every launch (I wasn't even aware of another one), but a company that's actually pushing for more space exploration. That's cool beans.
even if you don't ignore musk...
They've achieved all that despite musk. musk is an idiot and a fool, and he's far from an engineer. Imagine what they could do if his coke-and-ketamine fueled dipshitery decided to take up a different hobby.
Is it cool beans to litter the atmosphere with satellites and spend a metric fuckton on money, energy and garbage into "space exploration" while we treat the planet we live on is on fire and we treat it like shit? Isn't it weird that they plan to deliver weapons around the planet in a short time? That doesn't sound like a "space exploration" endeavour, it sounds like a military operation that is dressed up in make up so his fanboys go: whoooo, rockets, science.
The satellites burn up in the atmosphere
The money is budgeted
Yes the weapons part is sad
These trials are obviously the foundations of space exploration, you're spending mental effort trying to justify it's not
SpaceX is not run by Elon and he's kept from being involved closely by a buffer of people that keep him from getting too close to making any "elon" level changes.
SpaceX is successful despite Musk, not because of. And the woman who runs it knows that and keeps Musk away from any important decisions or impacts.
So the stuff they're doing is legit, cool aerospace stuff.
It's just not something Musk should take credit for. He does/will. But he shouldn't. He's a hack.
I'm guessing they let him name the Of Course I Still Love You?
Those names are taken from Iain M. Banks’ Culture sci-fi series.
But he shouldn't. He's a hack.
He's also a stupid doodoo brain, with poop and pee in his pants! Cacca doodoo!
Gee wizz mate, calm the frik down, we don't need that language around here!
That's not true in the least. He is CEO, CTO and Chief rocket designer. He's deeply involved in every step
"deeply involved in every step" absolutely not, because if he was it would be painfully obvious.
There are a few things that are different from what NASA has done in the past:
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SpaceX Rocket is the most powerful rocket ever, surpassing everything that NASA or anyone else has ever done.
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they are landing the rockets, with the aim of being able to recover them. If you skip the technicality that SpaceX first stage is suborbital but is part of an orbital launcher, that makes SpaceX the only entity who has achieved that, with some comparison to the Space Shuttle and Buran, though both were losing significant sections of the initial launcher, with very difficult repairs once on the ground.
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the cost of the launcher. In terms of capabilities, NASA's SLS is probably close to Starship. However, it costs around $2B/launch, and nothing is recoverable. Starship is meant for low cost. It is estimated that the current hardware + propellant for a single launch is under $100M. With reusability, a cost per launch under $10M is achievable in the mid term (10 years I would say) once the R&D has been paid ($1.4B/year at the moment, I would guess the whole development for Starship will be $10-20B, so same if not less than SLS).
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the aim for high speed reusability - SpaceX aim is to launch as much as possible, as fast as possible, with the same hardware. While it is a bit early to understand how successful they will be (Elon was saying a launch every 1hr, which seem to be very optimistic, I would bet 6-12hrs to be more achievable). That was NASA's original goal for the Space Shuttle, and they failed that.
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finally, orbital refueling means you have a single vehicle that can basically go anywhere in the inner solar system without much issues, and minimal cost.
Also, what gets people excited are the prospects of what this enables. A 10-100x decrease in the access to orbit changes completely the space economics and opens a lot of possibilities. This means going to the Moon is a lot simpler because now you don't need to reduce the mass of everything. This makes engineering way easier as you do not need to optimise everything to death, which tends to increase costs exponentially. And as for Mars, Starship is what makes having a meaningful colony there possible. Doing an Apollo like mission on Mars would have been possible for decades, but at a significant price for not much to show for. With cheap launch, you can just keep sending hardware there.
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NASA, nor anyone else, has done this before. I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say NASA did this already.
Wait, when did NASA land a fully reusable rocket like fucking Buck Rogers?
Then do it again, but capture it with the freakin' launch tower?
When did NASA even have a reusable rocket? Oh, the shuttle, the bastardized money pit for NSA/NRO/Air Force, that appears to have been designed to orbit a surveillance satellite chassis, which most people know as Hubble (it's one of many, this one being used to surveil the universe, instead of the earth).
And the shuttle was a quasi-reusable orbiter, not a rocket.
I believe NASA could also refurbish and re-use the SRBs, but the big orange tank was expended with every flight. The Space Shuttle Main Engines are actually still in service, we have a small inventory of them and they either have been or will be flown since 2011.
But I would definitely say that the moment the Falcon Heavy's two booster stages returned to Cape Canaveral and made synchronized powered landings was the moment 21st century space flight arrived. SpaceX is head and shoulders above what anyone else is doing with reusable rockets and spacecraft. Meanwhile Boeing is in the broom closet huffing Lysol and muttering about quarterly earnings.
They could reuse the SRB but the cost to refurbish them was like 90% of a new one. So it wasn't terribly useful.
Can I just add that "fucking Buck rogers" is an excellent phrase and all three words can mean sex and when combined they don't.
Honestly "Buck fucking Rogers" is a pretty big missed opportunity
Did you just talk shit on the shuttle and Hubble? Whaaat?
The shuttle was a massive and unsafe waste of space ship.
Not sure what Hubble did to catch this stray however.
What you're asking is akin to: why are people impressed by the airplane? We've already reached the Americas and India by boat.
SpaceX, and others actually are not advancing science per se, but are greatly improving/optimising the engineering so that it can be used in cheaper ways by others.
There's also the issue that after the moon landing we didn't really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded
There’s also the issue that after the moon landing we didn’t really improve that much and much of the knowledge faded
The NASA budget is now being invested in different rockets.
Have you seen their boosters land? It very much IS impressive. They basically made reusable rockets viable, which is a huge step for more affordable space flight.
Also their raptor engine is a marvel of engineering.
For me being impressed with SpaceX is kinda like loving a piece of art even though the creator turned out to be an asshole. Or liking Star Trek, even though Berman was shady af to put it mildly.
What SpaceX does is very impressive from a technical point of view. Even if the rocket never amounts to anything except this one successful test, it's still amazing they pulled it off. It tickles my engineer brain. And I think it's worth to honor all the people that made it happen, despite them having to work for Musk. Combine this with what could be in the future and you can hopefully see why people hail this test flight.
Now I still have serious doubts about Starship in the moon program. The on orbit refueling seems very sketchy and unproven at this point. Sure they will get two rockets into orbit, mate them up and transfer some fuel, that's a given at this point. But how much fuel are we talking? And how fast does the turnaround need to be to prevent losing a lot of it? How many ships and how many launches? Will this completely offset the cheaper launch costs due to reusability? It's a huge unknown and will push back the moon program to well into the 2030s.
Not a fan, but it generally boils down not to where they can fly but how they differ in other aspects, mainly cost.
SpaceX is currently the world pioneer in heavy reusable rockets, which is another way to say they are the only ones to launch big stuff up there so cheap, and it gets even better.
They are essentially doing the good side of capitalism - making stuff cheaper - applied to space, one of the most expensive industries in the world.
They are essentially doing the good side of capitalism - making stuff cheaper
I mean yeah, it's cheaper due to technological advancement, but I fail to see how that's an effect of capitalism. I'd argue similar developments would have been made even without capitalism. I just don't think we would have the desire to leave this place without capitalism, but that's besides the point.
Yeah but they're not and they don't. Downvote all you want (and you will) but I'm right
Thet didn't pioneer reusable rockets, that was done decades ago already, and they're not cheap either. They're expensive, and they're floating on government grants so that Elon musk can decide to absolutely obliterate a launch pad and pollute the kilometers wide surroundings.
SpaceX sull hasn't done anything hat wasn't done better long before. They do party hard reen a rocket of theirs explodes, which I never saw NASA do. Didn't watch NASA blow up launch pads because of their CEO either.
They managed to get their super duper new heavy rocket in an uncontrolled spin in low earth orbit! I'm sorry, Noy impressed by results that are less than half of what -again- NASA did in the 60' and 80' of the last century.
SpaceX might be much more if it drops it's current CEO
The(y) didn’t pioneer reusable rockets
They did pioneer reusable orbital liquid fueled rockets, closest before that was the space shuttle's SRBs (solid fuel, dumped and fished out the ocean).
and they’re not cheap either. They’re expensive,
They are incredibly cheap to operate by rocket standards, the reason why they haven't lowered the pricetag is:
a. Would absolutely be an anti-trust against them if they didn't stay close to competitors (monopoly by simply being too good is a thing)
b. Capitalism baby, they have no real competitor so they can make a crazy profit (and because of point A they basically have to unless they want to be sued to oblivion).
and they’re floating on government grants
Contracts* They have government contracts. Government requests a service, SpaceX provides the service, SpaceX gets paid, simple as that. They have gotten subsidies to expand Starlink, but every ISP gets that and even then they have been declined it countless times because AT&T, etc. have lobbied against them.
SpaceX s(ti)ll hasn’t done anything hat wasn’t done better long before.
I'm sorry, what other rockets and space capsules can be reused? What other rocket can be returned directly on the launch pad?
They do party hard (wh)en a rocket of theirs explodes, which I never saw NASA do.
Because they see milestones being completed in the testing program, it's about where it exploded (it was gonna explode either way, planned or unplanned).
They managed to get their super duper new heavy rocket in an uncontrolled spin in low earth orbit! I’m sorry, Noy impressed by results that are less than half of what -again- NASA did in the 60’ and 80’ of the last century.
NASA sent a 50m tall, 9m wide second stage that was designed to be fully reusable with full-flow staged engines and then transferred super-chilled fuel between tanks? Cool! Which system was that? Would love to read about it!
You might check your research a bit, go beyond Facebook GeForce your “facts”
You've supported none of these hollow, false claims.
SpaceX is a hole where government subsidy goes to die without purpose. They said they'd fly multiple manned cargo missions to a city they'd built on a terraformed Mars by 2022. How we doing?
Instead, musk was just served a divorced, sexually assaulted a woman and tried to bribe her with a horse, publicly destroyed twitter for the Saudis and stuck his whole gender affirming surgery reshaped face into trump's sloppy, bediapered asshole on stage - all while giving him $50 million dollars a month to interfere with an American election and demonize immigrants... as an immigrant.
I remember an interview with a former NASA engineer that said NASA would never be able to do anything near what SpaceX (or any other private company) can do. The reason given is that SpaceX spent billions after billions on what were essentially very expensive fireworks until they finally achieved a breakthrough. A breakthrough that wasn't a guarantee. Even Musk himself had said he would have eventually closed SpaceX if they hadn't achieved something and it would have been a multi billion dollar failure. He, and everyone else really, got very lucky.
Imagine NASA asking taxpayers for another billion dollars after blowing up the last billion with no guarantee this next billion would produce anything but another explosion. How many times would the public foot that bill? Not even once. Not while people don't have healthcare and homelessness and hunger exist. The government can't justify it and that's just how it is. The only way we get space travel, with our current system, is to hope someone with a lot of money is willing to bet it on a breakthrough. It sucks but the problem isn't Musk, it's the system that makes us reliant on billionaires for nice things.
In the meantime the military burns trillions on anti terrorism missions that are guaranteed to end up creating more terrorists that will be angry at the US, it's not as if the public wasn't used to their money being wasted on things that aren't guaranteed or that are guaranteed to lead to the opposite of what's intended and SpaceX isn't a charity, in the end the public will pay for all those billions they spent on R&D.
Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon's many, many side project misadventures he's pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.
My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it's worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.
Here's some solid numbers:
The Shuttle was so expensive that it might have been better to keep using the Saturn V. It accomplished a lot, but was ultimately a failure at its original goal of a reusable rocket with a fast turnaround. Some of the old hopes for it were to launch 100 Shuttle missions per year. As problems were found, it was clear it would never be close to that.
Falcon 9 was already an order of magnitude drop from what came before. Being able to grab the Starship booster by the chopstick method means it can quite possibly do the quick turnaround the Shuttle promised. That could mean another order of magnitude drop. Possibly even two orders of magnitude.
That's transformative. It's not just cheaper. It let's things be done that weren't possible before.
One subtle thing that's already come out of this is related to Starlink. Now, this has a whole lot of problems that I won't get into here, but it does have one fascinating effect. A rocket coming back down generates plasma that blocks radio signals to the ground. This means there's a blackout time where everyone in mission control stands by nervously while waiting to hear if it blew up or not.
What Starlink does is provide a high bandwidth link above the rocket, letting them relay data back to the ground. This means that not only do we have full communication during reentry, but even a live video feed of the exterior. This was not possible until fairly recently.
It should also be noted that we SpaceX didn't do this on their own. They benefited from decades of NASA R&D, launch facilities, and funding. Their biggest success comes from working around the pork barrel politics that hangs around NASA's neck.
Rapidly reusable orbital launch vehicles were unheard-of until Falcon 9. The Space Shuttle was supposed to fill that role, but NASA, ULA, and government elements have made it a horrid overbuilt pile of feature creep that was, at the same time, the crowning achievement of American aeronautical engineering, which was impossible to refurbish quickly. The same thing that is currently happening to SLS.
Propulsive landing of a first stage booster was an insane idea. Even massive space nerds like Everyday Astronaut were skeptical, and I watched him cream his jeans live when the first booster landed. That alone, the ability to reuse both the structure and the engines of the booster, as opposed to ditching them in the ocean (or in China's case, on top of villages), has made access to low Earth orbit significantly cheaper, and affordable to underfunded scientific organizations.
That being said, competition is closing in. Rocket Lab (New Zealand) is targetin the same industry with the Neutron rocket (CEO Peter Beck literally ate his hat when the announcement was made) and is experimenting with recovering its smaller Electron rocket using mid-air capture by a helicopter. Astra (USA) is developing a rapidly deployable small orbital launch rocket that can fit inside a standard shipping container. There's also Jeff Bezos and his massive overcompensation of a dick rocket that can also land propulsively, but not worth discussing.
Jeff Bezos and his massive overcompensation of a dick rocket that can also land propulsively, but not worth discussing.
In case anyone doesn't know why... it's not an orbital rocket. It just goes up and down. Orbital is going up AND sideways very fast.
Yep. It's called a sounding rocket. Jeff Bezos and his dick-shaped sounding rocket.
If he ever gets two vehicles into orbit and makes them dock together, the mental image might just be enough to kill me.
Because no one else is doing space things as well as spaceX is even if you think they suck.
Rockets are just cool tech. So is space tech. It grabs our imagination in a way that most terrestrial things dont.
Imagine you want to build a cabin in a very remote place in Alaska.
Getting there is quite difficult, you did it a few times in the 60's but the path is so bad that you had to throw the truck away each time (around $45,000 per trip, for the truck + gas)
You are still planning to build your cabin but having to buy a new truck for each trip is not great, plus the fact that only one company can make this SLS truck so you can't get more than once a year.
Building a cabin in these circumstances is close to impossible.
Now SpaceX makes a new Starship truck that can go all the way AND be reused. The trip from the hardware store to the build site now only costs you around $100 for the gas plus truck expenses AND you can now do the trip to the hardware store multiple times a day !
Now building the cabin becomes way more accessible.
Replace the Alaskan cabin with a scientific base on the moon or Mars and multiply the amounts by 100,000 and you have an approximation of the situation
NASA could have done this if they had the budget. Instead we'd rather give huge tax cuts to billionaires so they can build a private sector NASA to charge NASA exorbitant sums to use their private vehicles. It's the most asinine and innefficient way of going about it.
No, NASA has the budget. They already spent $50 billion on the development of SLS and Orion, Starship development cost is estimated to be around $10 billion.
So in theory with the money they spent on SLS they could have built 5 starship program.
The problem is that NASA has to follow political interests, sometimes the political interests align with technical interest and we get great things like the Apollo program.
Now SpaceX makes a new Starship truck that can go all the way AND be reused.
Not much of a spacex fan, but the fact that they were able to prove reusability on the falcon 9 and starship when the main players - ULA, Boeing, fuck, everyone said it was decades away IF EVER gets my attention. it illustrates how there are blind spots in all industries where people have to be shown what is possible because they'll never believe it and that dogma can stifle innovation for ages when left unchallenged.
I don't know they just launched and caught a rocket yesterday, that's pretty fucking cool.
If SpaceX landing and reusing rockets is not impressive to you then what is?
Short answer economics. Long answer a reusable rocket platform reduces the cost per launch to a fraction the price of traditional launches. That reduced the price per kg of mass in space making far more possible in space. I think ultimately its selling the idea that humanity can be a multi planetary species where we shall own the stars.
Well, at least the one star 😉
They are pretty focused on reducing the cost of launches by aggressively re-using components that would normally crash into the sea. Previous launches landed on floating sea platforms but yesterday's heavy was so big it needed a more stable landing zone. So after boosting the Star Liner the rocket returned down the trajectory it had followed up and then hovered briefly before being caught by two pincers on the very launch pad it had left five minutes before. That's pretty cool.
A lot of people pointed out a lot of firsts, huge cost reductions, regular flights, but let’s look from the opposite direction …..
Mass to orbit. SpaceX came from nowhere not too many years ago, jumped ahead of established manufacturers, until now they launch most of the worlds satellite mass to orbit, with an unparalleled success record, even with the recent failures. And this is with a rapidly growing space market
Everything they’ve achieved has not only let them scale up far surpassing the rest of the industry across the world, combined, but with reliability and cost to attract all that business
I don’t know what it would take for you to call it a revolution, but the impact on space business is revolutionary
This was right below your post in my feed:
People like space and his company is doing a lot of space
NASA makes extensive use of contractors. The moon hardware was largely designed, built and tested by private companies.
I read that nasa can't even make saturn v rockets anymore. that the design documents and manufacturing techniques weren't properly archived and everyone that worked on them has died by now. idk if any of that is true.
That’s kind of like saying that ford can’t make a model t anymore.
I’m sure they could, there’s just no reason to.
I’m also sure the contractors that built the Saturn V, those that are still in business, could build equivalent parts today if the government asked.
The Saturn five was an absurdly large rocket designed specifically to get 3 people from earth to the moon. It was insanely expensive per launch, and the only reason it ever flew was because the government was writing nasa blank checks in order to beat the soviets.
Today the government wants a reasonable dollar figure for a launch, and the days of spending a billion dollars per launch are long past.
Yep, $2B/launch now
It is true that we cannot make Saturn V rockets anymore.
The drawings are preserved, and even if they weren't, we have a few examples of unflown ones on display to study. There has been some institutional knowledge lost, several components were made by welding techniques we don't use anymore. Also, many of the components and materials used in the Saturn V are not manufactured anymore and are not available.
Building another Saturn V isn't entirely impossible, but the amount of retooling and re-engineering we'd have to do to the designs to get a flyable rocket we might as well just start over and call it a clean sheet design. Like Falcon Heavy, which put a sports car into solar orbit, or SLS which flew an Orion capsule around the moon in 2022.
Building your qualifications to teach advanced courses in being blasé?
first of all, allow me to State my opinion of Elon musk in one short sentence.
second of all, I will answer your question.
Lots of people here with very well fleshed out takes. Mine is simpler though, and by no means mutually exclusive:
Good marketing.
They know how to advertise themselves as a brand. They're easy to follow on any social media platform. For one or another, people are going to be looking at them- either in admiration, comparing it to others, just to be critical, or simply out of curiosity.
Both are doing impressive things, but only one is deliberately using media to build hype.
They are also very different organizations with very different goals.
NASA is focussed on science, they are trying to learn as much as possible about our solar system and the universe.
SpaceX by contrast is focussed on engineering. They aren’t trying to find life on Mars, they are trying to build the ferry service to it.
When NASA built rockets back in the 60’s, space flight was a science problem. We needed to figure out if it was even possible to do so. Can we even get a capsule into space? Can humans survive in zero gravity? Nowadays space flight is an engineering problem. We know it’s possible, we know the math, but can we actually build those things?
Also, economics of the equation are important. NASA is funded by american tax payer money, so politics gets involved. SpaceX is a business, so normal ameircan capitalism applies here.
I'm not very impressed by nasa. What have they done in the last 50 years? If anything, they seem to be sleeping.
I honestly don't think they have the desire to make earth a space traveling civilization. They are just looking for bacteria and will continue to do so for hundreds of years. It's all so pointless.