Comment by omni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by omni | Hacker News Reader

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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...

> 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.

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."

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

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?

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

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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