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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Nope. I don't want to diminish this great technological achievement in any way but this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon. Actually I am not even sure that setting foot on Mars will top the Moon, in some sense it's the same thing. And yes, I am aware of the huge difference between Moon and Mars. The first permanent human outpost, whether on the Moon, on Mars or elsewhere, may be the next step after going to the Moon and living in space stations that doesn't have the feel of an incremental step.

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> this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon.

You're right, this landing is a much bigger deal long-term. The Apollo program proved that one of the world superpowers, with a decades-long presidential mandate and a giant, massive bucket of funding, could do incredible things.[1] It was awesome, and it's clearly one of the defining moments in human history. However, the pace of space travel actually decreased after the Apollo program.[2] This probably had something to do with the fact that nobody wanted to spend untold billions of dollars to keep doing this stuff. The Moon landing was a big deal, but it was a one-off big deal. It didn't have world-changing impacts on the future, only on the moment.

The whole Mars objective of SpaceX probably isn't going to be their lasting contribution to humanity. All their technological achievements so far pale in comparison to how hard it will be to live on Mars. They may well fail. However, the reusability improvements they are making have significant potential to increase the rate of space flight for the rest of our existence. That's a gift-that-keeps-on-giving big deal, and enables all sorts of options that were prohibitively expensive before. We're all really hoping the graph in [2] starts spiking up soon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Cost_of_Apollo_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_spaceflight#Orbita...

>The Moon landing was a big deal, but it was a one-off big deal. It didn't have world-changing impacts on the future, only on the moment.

I very much agree with this sentiment and your other points. I think the comment you are replying to is thinking about this achievement in a 20th century frame-of-reference[1], and not considering the tremendous amount of potential cheaper space travel has.

[1] By this I mean that he is thinking of space exploration nothing more than an inspirational endeavour.

> decades-long presidential mandate

A small note to put things into perspective: moon landing happened only 12 (!) years after Sputnik. It happened only 8 (!) years after Kennedy's speech and Gagarin's first space walk. The first launch of actual Apollo equipment was 3.5 years before the manned landing.

In other words: humans went from launching the first satellite to putting people on the Moon in 12 years. In 8 years from first person in space to first person on the Moon.

That's the speed of focused progress. Something we very much lack these days.

We've also got a much lower appetite for risk.

Challenger _really_ screwed things up

I don't think that's true, or rather it didn't help but it's not the problem. The program wasn't doing so many interesting things before Challenger, either.

I think the "space race" was born with the seeds of its own doom. Wanting to beat the Russians to the moon provided the political and economic will to put a huge effort into the Apollo program - but after that was achieved the interest evaporated.

If you are more interested in the pissing contest than the science and exploration, it isn't surprising that the latter gets short shrift in the long run.

Yes, death and pain used to be much cheaper. Just look at how they took out kidney stones before anesthesia.

Maybe we need more gentleman adventurers willing to further the patriotic cause by living for a year and a half in a small sunless box, risking horrible death and scurvy? These guys went for years subsisting on mostly meat-like substances preserved with 19th century technology and structural biscuits.

Actually, Robert Zubrin advocated such an approach for years. Mars One shows that there are plenty who would volunteer for such a thing. Hell, Mars One crew are essentially volunteering for semi-solitary exile unto death. I wonder if the Chinese or Russians are going to go the, "So it's risky? Screw It!" route?

That's the speed of focused progress. Something we very much lack these days.

Thank God. We were very close to midnight, during the 1960s and 70s.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the "midnight" reference, I believe Jess may be talking about the Doomsday Clock on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

http://thebulletin.org/timeline

(Jess, correct me if I'm mistaken.)

Unfortunately, the clock hands are currently set at 3 minutes to midnight, the closest we've been since 1953. The hands were much farther from midnight in the '60s and '70s.

But the result wasn't sustainable. Saturn V and Apollo were amazing technical achievements, but they were too expensive for the long term. That's also the result of focused progress.

What we saw here is part of a shift that could make a future Moon mission cost $10 million instead of $1 billion, which will help put an end to the sad title of "last person on the Moon."

I really appreciate and mostly agree with your sentiment, but I still keep thinking to myself:

The Space Shuttle was reusable too.

With the Space Shuttle, we returned the primary motors to the ocean, but it was incredibly expensive to refurbish them (they were essentially scrapped and used as parts), and of course the shuttle itself was completely reused.

What SpaceX achieved here is a potentially better margin of costs for reuse, but even that hasn't been proven until we actually start reusing the rockets, seeing how their reliability trails off after each use, etc.

As great as I think this achievement is, it's not orders of magnitude better than the Space Shuttle. And it remains to be seen whether space travel will become truly accessible and cheap because of it.

> it's not orders of magnitude better than the Space Shuttle

I think it might be. The Space Shuttle cost an estimated $1B / launch. So while it was technically reusable, it wasn't practically reusable in the same way that Musk is aiming for (launch, land, refuel, refly).

I believe the current target with only Stage 1 being reusable is $40MM/launch with the Falcon 9. Currently a F9 launch costs in the neighborhood of $60MM. These are both cost to the customer, not to SpaceX.

I agree.

Fifty years since we stepped on the moon, and we're just now re-using rockets? It's a great accomplishment, no doubt. Many congratulations to all involved.

But this should have been done in the 1970s. The same economic drivers that lead us to do it today were still there back in the day. What happened is that we lost sight of the economics of space travel -- if we ever had our eye on them in the first place. We chased a rabbit down the wrong hole. Political systems exist and thrive for political reasons. NASA was always going to be about bringing home the bacon to defense contractors and looking good for the current administration. Elon is stuck with an economics/efficiency goal: make it both safe and cheap.

Just to be clear, my comment has nothing to do with the great folks at Space-X. I'm a huge fan. My point is that they're just continuing the natural evolution of spaceflight. But in the big picture, it's an incremental achievement (and yep, I know how difficult it was. All of this stuff is difficult.)

The next big goal is probably regularly-scheduled private manned spaceflights. And no, I don't mean sub-orbital fun rides. More like week-long tourist trips to the space station or a moon base. This would indicate that 1) access to space is truly becoming relatively cheap and reliable, and 2) there's actually somewhere to go.

Historic things are things we do for the first time, sure. Re-landing a rocket qualifies, but it is much in the category of orbital-docking: necessary but a footnote. Anybody remember the first manned space mission that did docking? How about that remembering the first one to leave Earth orbit? Space fans like me would know. But not in the history books for the general public.

Note that the question was about how historically important this is. Not how critical it is to spaceflight, or any other qualifier. It can be stupendously important in terms of the technical details, yet have very little value historically.

I agree that this isn't a Moon-landing scale event, it could be more similar to the first Apollo launch, or maybe the first Space Shuttle launch. This isn't so impressive in itself as it is in what it enables for the future.

However, I would disagree that Mars is just more of the same as was the Moon landing. It would be not unlike saying that because Columbus went to America, later discoveries weren't so impressive.

I see this in a slightly different way. I consider (mass)producing chips with billions of transistors, building 200 meter high skyscrapers and similar things as impressive achievements even though they are kind of routine at this point. But they are no longer doing something for the first time and I think doing something for the first time is an important part of what makes an impressive event a really outstanding one. And at least for me right now going to Mars seems not sufficiently different from going to the Moon to have the feel of a first but that is surly very subjective.

>this is not even close to setting foot on the the Moon.

I strongly disagree. Landing on the moon provides evidence that humanity is technologically capable of space travel. More or less a proof of concept. But markedly reducing the cost of going into outer space means that humanity now has access to space tourism and whatever future benefits space brings.

No one knows about the first digital computers in the 1940s. The general public sees the computer revolution as happening in the 80s and 90s, because that is when computers were made available to consumers.

It is the clearest milestone of a new era - in a way the moon landings and shuttle turned out not to be - space travel where the main expense is fuel.

The next one will be the first reusable flight with a booster.

moon and mars basically the same thing? O_O the radiation earth||mars and earth||moon are quite different in both duration and intensity. I believe its something they really haven't figured out.

speaking of duration, that's a big deal in both fuel and effect on human passengers.

but lets get to the important stuff, mars is actually a planet, with an atmosphere. saying the two are equivalent is more or less saying kicking a field goal outside on a windy day is the same as kicking one in a dome. except when you miss everyone dies.

you also need 5x escape velocity from mars (we want them to come back too), which means more fuel and landing with lots of fuel. or at the very least sending fuel prior and hope nothing happens to it.

It's very likely that methane engines will be used. Methane will be easy to make in mars and it's much more dense than hydrogen.

Also terraforming mars will probably involve dumping methane into the atmosphere.

The Moon landing in the context of science and technologies available in the mid- to late-60's was an absolutely monumental human achievement that won't soon be equaled.

It was just 66 years after the Wright brothers!

ps - I think the landing yesterday was a pretty sizable achievement.

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