Why the SpaceX landing is Better than Apollo 11 | Hacker News Reader

Why the SpaceX landing is Better than Apollo 11

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74 pointslochieferrier82 comments

> The moon landing was certainly extremely inspirational, but it was never going to lead to anything as the rockets always ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Apollo missions are literally the reason that any of us are able to do modern aerospace at the capacity we are. I appreciate the sentiment of the author, but in terms of progress, it's almost like saying that Chuck Yaeger's flight in the Bell X-1 was more important than the Wright Flyer.

Both are extremely important milestones, but landing on the Moon, in under a decade, from near-zero, is more impressive. And I'm biased toward SpaceX.

It might be a case of each generation thinking their achievements are somehow more noteworthy than those in years gone by. People have short memories. How much of what spaceX is doing actually builds on what was learned in the preceding decades at the cost of many lives and enormous sums of taxpayer money around the world.

If SpaceX is just building on existing knowledge that everyone else who cooperated with NASA has access to, then why is SpaceX so much better at rocketry than everyone else? NASA is spending 1.5-2 billion dollars per year for ~10 years to develop their expensive one-use super-heavy lift rocket, whereas SpaceX spent <1 billion in total to get to the Falcon 9. SpaceX is making the first real moves towards lower-cost launch systems, and this is a completely different (and more sustainable) achievement than going to the moon by throwing money into the spigot.

SpaceX has done a fantastic job, but that still doesn't diminish what was achieved by those that went before them many years ago, or change the fact that they stand on the shoulders of giants.

The people who helped SpaceX get where they are today are the people who designed earlier liquid rocket engines, found out which propellants were best, and came up with the principles of multiple stage rockets. NASA's achievements have been stunning, and I am in awe of many, but only a tiny proportion (<<5%) of NASA's spending and attention has been laying the groundwork for SpaceX's achievements. If NASA wanted to contribute to the future of manned spaceflight, they would be experimenting with simulated Mars and Lunar gravity at the ISS.

It's not that simple. It's not like some video game tech tree unlock where suddenly you get access to lots of cool new stuff just because of some prior work.

NASA had less technology when some of this original work was done (and still does in some cases), there are budget considerations, public organization issues, political maneuvering and plenty of monopoly contracts meant to make as money as possible instead of improving technology. They're great at what they do but they are far from an optimal organization.

You are describing a great set of excuses for NASA, but none of these things help SpaceX develop better rockets.

> why is SpaceX so much better at rocketry than everyone else?

Because Spacex doesn't have to deal with these things. In fact they benefit from the Nasa funding right now as a major source of revenue. They wouldn't have survived if they were just self-funded. Also they can get talent from NASA and other organizations that have already done a lot of groundbreaking work with pioneers in the field.

Just to be clear, Spacex has focused on reducing the launch costs but they haven't yet and they still have a long way to go to actually delivering people and heavier loads in a repeatable process. They've also taken about 15 years to get to the last launch so none of this was quick.

Agreed on all counts and, fundamentally, while the Bell X1 involved using a whole lot of technology that did not exist in the Wright flyer (rocket engine, metal airframe, rigid control surfaces), SpaceX essentially combined modern computers with things Apollo already achieved (indeed, the Apollo program involved landing rockets on the moon just with a human pilot instead of a computer).

To be fair to the computer, it did all of the hard work. The LEM was probably not controllable by a human alone. Even when the commanders selected manual mode (as they did on all but one landing), they were really just controlling the outer loop of the LEM.

It did all the work the way computers do all the work on jet planes today, yet pilots still made a big difference. Neil Armstrong saved Apollo 11 from catastrophe, flying the LEM by the seat of his spacesuit.

The Apollo lunar landers had plenty of computer assistance, both for navigation, guidance and control during landing. E.g. to control the throttle during final descent so that the spacecraft didn't reach zero vertical velocity and start moving upwards again. The landings were much less automated than they would be today, but Apollo would have been vastly more difficult without computers.

I think the X-1 is still in the camp of furthering advanced expensive technology and pushing the boundary of what is possible, compared to SpaceX and their efforts to make space transport practical. In support of the author's theory think of the significance of the Ford Model T compared to whatever the first impractical car was.

But I don't think it's possible to judge historical significance of anything with so little hindsight available. Give it another few decades and then let's talk about what the most significant spaceflight development was.

Unless I'm misremembering, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Let's repeat that so there is no misunderstanding. APOLLO 11 LANDED ON THE MOON.

Remember all those folks dismissing what Blue Origin did because what SpaceX did was so much harder? Well, what NASA did a half century ago was orders of magnitude harder.

being harder does not make it 'better' (itself a loaded word). The moon Lansing might nave been inspirational but had limited practical consequences, cheap rockets are a huge enabler for ton of things.

Exactly! The Burj Dubai is an impressive landmark to construction, and so are the Pyramids of Giza. But one took 40K manual laborers and decades of work, and the other took a crew of thousands and a couple of years. There are more things at play than whether something is possible. As the OP noted, what SpaceX is attempting is sustainability and that, as any investor knows, is the secret sauce in long term success.

Earth is heavy. Lifting cargo in space from Earth is expensive due to gravity. Numbers:

Earth escape velocity: 11,000 m/s, energy to propel 1kg to escape velocity: 60MJ.

Moon escape velocity: 2,400 m/s, energy to propel 1kg to escape velocity: 3MJ.

Moon based interplanetary travel is 20 times more efficient than Earth based interplanetary travel. A robotized Moon base would make economic interplanetary travel a whole lot cheaper. Step 1 for a Moon base is landing on the Moon, so I wouldn't dismiss Apollo just yet. Perhaps they were 100 years ahead of the times, but their heart [and mind!] was in the right place.

Being early is the same as being wrong in aerospace just as it is for VC (i.e. Northrop YB-49, Boeing 2707, Lockheed D-21). While the Apollo program was an impressive flags and footsteps mission, it did not pave the way to a future lunar base. The Apollo astronauts were lucky to get back alive (, if you've ever looked at how many single points of failure there were on the LEM and CM, you know what I mean).

Hey man, I think you're off base here.

The problem is that the Moon does not have significant resources, so you can't really make anything on the Moon and then launch it from there. It may be possible to make some propellants, but not much else. As a refueling station, it could be a good idea. But for anything other than fuel, the Moon doesn't really work out as you have to lift it from LEO first. Entering Space by Robert Zubrin has more detailed technical arguments about this.

It's my understanding that there are irons and titanium ores on the moon as well, though I do not know in what quantities.

People seem so determined to undermine one achievement because of another, "better", one. I love what NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin and others are doing. Such silliness.

I would say the original headline was a ridiculous shot fired, wouldn't you?

It's hyperbole. But the Falcon 9 first stage landing is still one of the most significant historical moments in spaceflight. Especially if you only consider things that have happened after 1973. I'll have to come back to this comment in 20 years to see if I was way off base when I said this, but it seems like a sound statement to me.

Agreed. I think it's exciting less for the technical achievement and more so for what it could mean for private space flight. For the first time, some real economies of scale may be able to be leveraged in space flight. The first internal combustion engine was a huge technical achievement but it wasn't until Ford figured out how to mass produce a car that things really started changing.

> APOLLO 11 LANDED ON THE MOON

WITH THE TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE IN THE 1960s.

SpaceX is cool - no doubt - but come on!!

care to elaborate ?

I don't agree that the SpaceX landing is better than Apollo 11. I don't measure something in "How available is the technology to me?". I measure in "How hard is that?". I'm not downplaying what SpaceX did to be controversial.

I'm just of the opinion that the challenges that NASA had to overcome 50 years ago to get to the moon involved alot more "unknown" information.

I think anyone who has wanted to do "something that's never been done before" can appreciate the trailblazers that had no other option than to make an educated guess because algorithms, processing power, failure modes did not exist.

> WITH THE TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE IN THE 1960s

Exactly, in 1969, sir, they had to code everything WITH NEGATIVE TIMESTAMPS [1]. Apart from the joke, it underlines the prehistoric era of technology at the time.

http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2015/10/06/before-timestamp-0/

"Let's repeat that so there is no misunderstanding. APOLLO 11 LANDED ON THE MOON."

Exactly. And did it when computing power and knowledge was vastly less than it is today(not to mention that what SpaceX did was standing on the shoulders of giants or whatever that saying is...)

Not only that, but Apollo 11 had 3 primates safely housed inside of it, and said primates managed to get out and go for a stroll on the moon. Then they hopped back in apollo 11, blasted on back to earth, and told everyone about it.

And then they went back, brought some CARS, and DROVE around on the moon, and came back again.

Everyone should watch the documentary series "When We Left Earth".

Well, two of them did. One of them gave the strolling a miss and chilled out.

I've been a long time skeptic of SpaceX's goal, and I have to admit that I'm reconsidering my assessment with that successful landing. Frankly I'm amazed they eventually managed to do that.

But let's not get too carried away, ok? Because with sentences like:

> Mars, asteroids, the Oort cloud and beyond, all with technology and physics we thoroughly know today.

and:

> The SpaceX future is completely open, currently only limited by the amount of atoms in the universe.

it really seems like this is way too optimistic. I mean it's not like SpaceX has cracked interstellar travel or anything. Mentioning the Oort cloud for instance is quite weird : we barely can send un-manned spacecrafts there. And even if we could, it's such a big place that bodies there are separated by astronomical units of emptiness. What exactly would men do there?

Also, even if we can bring the cost of space-flight to something comparable to the cost of an intercontinental airplane trip, I would remain skeptical about mars colonization. The fact remains that mars is a gigantic barren waste land, with a tenuous, oxygen-less atmosphere, barely any water, frigid temperatures and continuous radiations from the sky.

Imagine the worst place on Earth where to spend your holidays. If a travel agency tells me that prices for a plane ticket to this place have dropped by 99%, I'd still would not want to go there. I wouldn't even go for free.

The problem with your logic is that the current highest hurdle to any of those goals, even the Oort cloud is how much it costs to get anything into orbit. We already know how to construct things in orbit. Getting the massive equipment cheaply into orbit busts the door open to serious space travel, not launching over-sized washing machines into orbit around comets.

> current highest hurdle to any of those goals, ... is how much it costs to get anything into orbit.

This is true for micro-sats, but an awful lot of high end communications sats as well as (I'm assuming) the deep space exploration vehicles cost on the order or 10x their launch cost. Dropping the launch price isn't going to drop the total price tag by much.

Isn't that partially because these vehicles are designed under strict weight and volume constraints, so that they can be launched in one piece?

I imagine being able to cheaply put tons and tons of equipment in orbit and do the build up there would remove all those constraints and maybe allow the use of cheaper construction and technology.

I think the poster is saying if we can launch cheaply, potentially assemble in space, we might find new techniques for doing everything in the space pipeline more cheaply now that the first stage in the pipeline is less prohibitively expensive.

Not sure I agree or disagree but it's a POV.

Manufacturing those items in orbit and/or on the moon might reduce their cost. Cheap to-orbit rates lessen barriers to that sort of technology. Transporting raw materials to orbit would increase the efficiency of the to-orbit trip by increasing cargo density.

Wouldn't higher cargo density be more of a benefit if launch costs are high?

Indeed. Raw materials in space won't be of great use without in-orbit manufacturing infrastructure. Cheap to-orbit begets economically realistic in-orbit manufacturing begets need for raw materials at high densities in orbit.

What's really encouraging is that Google is investing $1B in them. Musk has the tech, the team, and the track record, and now the backing. It's entirely possible he can get a Mars colony bootstrapped, if that's really the plan here.

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/google-spacex-investment

According to the article this money was more intended for the deployment of communication satellites.

$1B seems short for a mars colony anyway.

The communication satellites are meant to become a revenue source to find the Mars mission

I agree that the impact of reusing the space craft is overlooked by many people. I tried to explain to a person that we could not go back to the moon today if we wanted too. And their argument was "hey we did it before, we have all those old plans, we could just build another Saturn V/Apollo system and be back in however long that took. And having talked with folks at Kennedy Space center, and read the discussions in Air & Space hosted by the Smithsonian, I know that many of the key things we "knew" about operationally building a moon capable rocket we would have to "re-learn". The original folks are gone.

All we could do would be to speed up the learning a bit by throwing money at building multiple test case rockets without any means of creating a sustainable system.

So yes, SpaceX has made a huge step. It will be interesting to see how others approach the problem (and everyone who wants to be competitive in the launch space will have to have an answer at some point). And yes, not a lot of people have realized how big a step that is. But a few years from now when SpaceX goes public perhaps and their S-1 shows just how much of an advantage this gives them, I'm confident people will look back and say, "That was when we re-entered the space age for 'real'."

Not sure what you are talking about. The SLS is in active development at the moment. An unmanned Orion capsule is planned to orbit the moon in November 2018, followed by manned missions 3 years after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

There is a great discussion at the Kennedy Space center visitor's complex about all of the Apollo knowledge they are re-learning and improving on with the SLS. From trying to re-create the F1 engine (in the F1a) to spacecraft management systems. There are tales (perhaps apocryphal) about going to senior centers to talk to some of the original engineers. The narrative is very much that this sort of ship/endeavour was a lost art which they are recreating from artifacts, new research, and people who were there at the time.

I cannot judge how accurate that narrative is though.

For starters, Orion is still planned to cost from $500 million to $1 billion PER LAUNCH. Given that this is a government project, I'm gonna guess closer to the high bound.

Second, the Saturn V/Apollo mission was a diplomatic show of muscle. Those who believe the SLS will be the future of manned space travel fail to appreciate that without the pressure of the Soviet Union, there is absolutely no way the project will outlast the attrition of a 10-year non-wartime Congressional budget session.

And all that is moot anyway, as the Saturn V and Apollo systems were built extremely fast, and to do that meant using a myriad of sub contractors [0].

According to Ars[1], the SLS basically had to reverse engineer an F-1 that was pulled from one of the Apollo launches. There were no extant blueprints for a massive LOX/RP engine, and few people alive who had any experience with it. SCUD missile builders with deep government contacts and ensured the STS (Space Shuttle) system would largely rely on the force of solid boosters, with the LOX engines significantly reduced in size and totally different from the Saturn V boosters.

More than anything, the Ars article points out how absurdly homebrewed the Saturn V was. Hand drilled nozzle ports? The system was hacked together for one purpose, and then discarded. What Space X is doing, and what SLS will fail to do, is make orbit accessible to people besides a government that controls the world's fiat currency and can basically do what it wants provided it has the political capital (as it did during the Cold War).

The Saturn V and Apollo system will stand as one of the greatest achievements of the modern era. But, like the Pyramids of Giza, it did little to spur a sea change of similar technology. There is no great proliferation of massive pyramids after those at Giza were built. And there was no great proliferation of human landings on extra-terrestrial surfaces after Saturn V.

Elon Musk's goal in space is more similar to George Fuller, using revolutions in contracting to build big buildings cheaply. After Fuller, huge and tall interior spaces became cheap to build and those buildings proliferated around the globe.

0: http://amyshirateitel.com/2011/04/03/the-lost-art-of-the-sat... 1: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-...

Would SpaceX and rocket technology in general be where it is today without the historical pioneers and stepping stones? The title premise is ridiculous. Apollo 11 was one of the major historical events of the modern era and probably inspired countless engineers and scientists to take up their craft. The reusable rocket development is certainly a keystone of the future of space exploration and SpaceX is on the leading edge of it, but no one is going to remember where they were in 30 years on the day the Falcon 9 landed itself (okay, maybe some of the team and a few others).

What the Apollo missions pulled off is still mind boggling, today: people landed on the moon, walked and drove around, and came back safely.

These articles are really frustrating to read - there is no such thing as "better" as this isn't a competition.

That being said, landing actual people on the moon decades ago with less technology and sheer determination is much "better" in my book. SpaceX is cool but let's not forget about the true pioneers.

> It’s never been about being the first to do something. It’s about making it accessible to the masses.

Oh, boy.

Putting things in and out of context according to the story that needs to be spun has a bright future as a literary genre.

> It’s never been about being the first to do something. It’s about making it accessible to the masses

I suspect the purpose of this statement is to conjure up the ghost of, and likely draw parallels to another "revolutionary genius". This trope needs to die: it undermines the effort put in by the giants upon whose shoulders these alleged "ubermensch" stand.

Sorry, but it really isn't. Who knows what SpaceX will achieve in the next couple of years but let's not belittle the Apollo 11 achievement, given the time it was done in, the resources it took and the state of technology back then it was an absolutely amazing achievement, way ahead of what SpaceX has achieved to date.

But the future isn't quite over yet and SpaceX has one advantage, they are moving whereas Apollo 11 is frozen in time.

Calling SpaceX 'better than Apollo 11' indicates a poor understanding of the situation back then. Apollo 11 was a milestone, reusable rockets is also a milestone, but a completely different one.

I'm wondering how the author would have looked at SpaceX had the situation been reversed, in case Apollo 11 would have been the mission that allowed NASA to launch a rocket to a good bit of orbital velocity and then to capture it for re-use and SpaceX would have put a man on the moon last week. Would they still feel that the SpaceX achievement was the smaller one?

That is just lie. Source says that entire "Spacecraft Development" for entire Apollo was just $52,000,000. I bet development and testing cost was merged into hardware cost. Plus many expensive parts were reusable (launch pads, testing facilities)...

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_18-16_Apollo_Program_...

You're misreading the chart -- a bit farther down, there are lines giving a ~$3.8 billion total cost for "command and service modules", and ~$2.2 billion for "lunar module". And those figures don't include spacecraft systems which have their own line items (e.g., "guidance and navigation"), or the cost of the rockets that launched the spacecraft.

The "spacecraft development" line you're looking at includes only charges for 1962, while the program was still in its earliest phases, most likely before mission mode (and the separation of command and lunar modules) had even been decided.

And you can multiply all those figures by about 7 to correct for inflation and give you the rough cost in today's dollars.

Apollo was hugely expensive.

Original article states that 3/4 of Apollo budget went into 'non-recoverable hardware'. It is very misleading.

Just silly! Pioneers are more important than bringing the pioneering to the masses. We don't pioneer for perfection, we pioneer for discovery. Completely different purposes but without discovery, there is nothing to perfect.

The Space Shuttle was supposed to be reusable and cheap, too. Originally, there were supposed to be 100 flights per shuttle, or about 400 for the program. There were 135, and two shuttles blew up and were replaced. Turnaround time was supposed to be about two weeks; in practice it took months. Each launch ended up costing about $600 million.

Space-X says they hope to reuse maybe 75% of a booster. Boosters probably go back to the plant to be rebuilt, not to the pad to be launched again.

Rockets have been mass produced before. Thousands of ICBMs were produced on assembly lines.

The tyranny of the rocket equation still applies. Spacecraft are almost all fuel mass (85-95%), and can't be built with the robustness level of commercial aircraft, which are only 40% fuel at takeoff. Fuels can't get any better; liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen is as good as it gets. Unless and until we get fission or fusion propulsion, space launches will be a marginal technology.

The Apollo program originally included a nuclear-powered upper stage. It's too bad that never launched. Nuclear rocket engines have been built and ground tested, but they're rather messy.

>Space-X says they hope to reuse maybe 75% of a booster. Boosters probably go back to the plant to be rebuilt, not to the pad to be launched again.

They plan to reuse the entire booster, only refuel will be is necessary.

They only recover the first stage, which is about 3/5 of the rocket right now. Maybe they'll work on recovering the 2nd stage but they currently abandoned that due to viability and cost of recovery tech.

It's going to be very hard for anyone to create a perfectly usable rocket that all comes back for reuse, possibly never based on how cargo is sent up there in the first place.

While I get the point the article is trying to make, and I think Falcon 9's landing deserves more coverage, the premise is horse shit.

SpaceX couldn't do what it's doing without NASA's prior accomplishments in space flight, including Apollo 11.

Saying the Apollo mission "was never going to lead to anything sustainable" is absolute nonsense. It lead precisely to where we are today.

In other news: why the iPhone is better than the invention of the transistor.

As impressive as the landing is, it won't yet make as dramatic a cost difference as people think. The problem is that there are a bunch of cost and performance multipliers that are easy to overlook.

1. Only a portion of the rocket is reusable, you still pay full price for the upper stage.

2. The part that is reusable has to be built better to survive multiple uses and needs to have extra equipment for recovery, so it's more expensive.

3. The performance of the reusable pieces is compromised due to the extra weight of the fuel and equipment for recovery.

4. There are still refurbishment costs after every flight, presumably we will know soon how significant these are.

5. You lose economies of scale in making the boosters since you make fewer of them.

Overall I would expect that with all of these together you'll see maybe a 30% total cost reduction. A lot of these same arguments were made about shuttle costs and reusability, and it didn't pan out. SpaceX certainly can and has learned from that failure, but many of the basic mathematical realities still apply.

6. Not enough data yet to determine rates of failure and associated costs.

Yeah, silly astronauts and their moon landing. Puh!

Replace the X in SpaceX with Shuttle for 35 years worth of time travel. The SpaceX landing is an amazing technical achievement, but it will not bring more change than a radically cheaper manufacturing process for rocket engines would.

Apollo 11 was an event for all mankind, the realization of a dream. Cheap spaceflight is certainly a dream, but SpaceX isn't all mankind. It's a corporation. Even if one views Apollo as "owned" by a single country, SpaceX's achievements are owned by a single legal person, and in turn the shareholders. SpaceX has done something great, but is isn't like they are going to allow everyone else on the planet to start using their technology. This is a business.

Apollo and SpaceX, Apples and oranges.

> but is isn't like they are going to allow everyone else on the planet to start using their technology

I don't understand. Did the Apollo program do that? Did it even intended to? NASA is a government agency, so I guess you can tell that "people", and more accurately american citizens, own it, but isn't it a bit abstract?

For the common Joe, NASA and SpaceX are two organizations that are just as opaque and difficult to join or "own".

There really is not as much difference as you seem to think, and I don't get why only Apollo 11 could be an "event for all mankind". Also SpaceX certainly is the "realization of a dream", at the very least of Musk's dream.

Nasa is different. As a wing of the US government many of their innovations were shared. From a public perspective, all the photos and such taken during Apollo were public domain. Earthrise, arguably the most well-known image on earth, went strait to public domain. (This might explain some of the lack of coverage given that all the media feeds were SpaceX-owned and it wasn't clear how they were to be shared.)

Engineers who worked at Apollo-era Nasa also went on to all sorts of things, carrying lots of knowhow with them. Even those working for contractors operated under a different regime than today. But the similar knowhow at SpaceX is today proprietary. We won't see any SpaceX engineers walking over to boeing to replicate the technology, not without lawsuits every which way.

I don't mean to criticize, just to illustrate that today's space-fairing corporations are not interchangeable with Nasa.

Better?

For those of you scoring at home, SpaceX is 1 for 4 on soft landing with spectacular landing failures for CRS-5 and CRS-6. CRS-7 exploded on the pad at launch.

The Apollo program sent 8 missions TO THE MOON AND BACK with only one failure. Everyone returned from every one of those missions and nothing exploded.

If you were going into space, who's rocket would you rather be sitting on top of: NASA's 1969 Saturn 5 or Elon Musk's 2015 Falcon 9?

Apollo also had an on-pad failure that killed three men.

Well, Soyuz lands on rockets and has done so for what, 60 years? I guess this new technique is flashier, using no parachutes, so that's cool.

The Soyuz capsule yeah, and according to passengers the landing is a bit like being in a car wreck.

Some college kid writes an article trying to downplay the accomplishments of Apollo 11 and stir up sentiment... Clickbate and HN fell for it.

I wrote the article, what you and everyone else has said is super true. I liked the Apollo 11 missions as much as everyone else, and I think I am off base. It's not a sport.

Does anyone has some interesting article on the SpaceX reusable vehicle, how do they do with the vibrations on the structure? How many times can they reuse it? What did they do differently because of reuse? How does the landing shock affect the reusability etc.

I can understand the benefits of reusable rockets, etc., but what exactly is the benefit of a controlled landing like this? Couldn't the same reusability benefits be obtained more simply and at less cost (and fuel) with say a big parachute?

This counterpoint is edging towards meme status (just try googling). The usual counter-counterpoints to parachutes:

* Parachute hardware adds non-useful weight

* Salt water landings increases refurbishing costs

* Active guidance ("hitting the X") allows for less logistics

* Parachute landing technology would not work on other solar system bodies, meaning less tech would transfer to Mars

There are a few problems, but mainly, it just doesn't meet the requirements for rapid reuse. The goal is to reach the aviation operations model. Land it, inspect it, load it, gas it, go. A turn around measured in hours, not days or weeks. Fishing rockets out of the ocean 200 miles off the coast could never be rapid.

Then there is the technical problem, we're talking about 14tons falling from space at speeds up to 5000mph. Desiging a parachute for that job is anything but simple.

Lastly, it just doesn't scale. Consider that they are designing a rocket for moving huge payloads to Mars. This landing method should scale up to a Saturn V class booster just fine, parachutes just keep getting harder as the weight goes up.

Sorry, but no.

Landing a $60mil rocket is an achievement. Going to the _farking moon_ via 5 F5 engines strapped to your ass that were designed using slide rules and graph paper is impressive. You're comparing popcorn tins vs fruitcakes.

The whole game changes when there are people atop the rocket. Let's wait for SpaceX to cross that bridge safely and repeatedly -- then reflect.

I really don't get the need to be a "better" achievement. SpaceX's immediate objective is affordable transport into space, Apollo was solely focused on human-manned space exploration... So we can agree that this is a case of apples and oranges? Even if they were in the same domain, the pursuit of science isn't a sport, it's a collaborative effort where one stands on the shoulders of those who came before them and re-draws the boundaries of human intellect. SpaceX owes a lot of what they can take for granted to the Apollo program, as does Apollo to the physicist who preceded them.

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