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mempko

Today is a melancholy feeling. Happy to see SpaceX sending people to space, but sad a decade was lost.

EDIT: I spoke about that we had a regression, I meant that NASA lost a capability and just got it back.

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This is actually a brand new capability for NASA: human spaceflight that isn't ruinously expensive.

Federal government has no limits to spending.

This isn't about cost, it's about privatizing space the same way the internet was privatized. Take technology developed in the public sector and allow the private sector to take it.

With the privatization of space, you will get both the same upsides and downsides of privatization.

The only difference between the past, where NASA paid private contractors to build Apollo and the Shuttle is now they are paying a private contractor (SpaceX) but SpaceX gets to sell the tech for others to use besides the government.

There hasn't been a regression, but priorities changed. NASA is a government agency and is thus subject to politics. But make no mistake, we are ahead of where we were in the 1960's, both technologically and organizationally (i.e. a private company achieving spaceflight). This is unequivocally a step forward.

Our parents didn't have privately-owned reusable spaceflight.

Just wait till you see Starship.

A decade? More than four decades. The shuttle was never really about anything else than near earth orbits, this is the first time in a very long time that we are just possibly looking to expand the envelope.

I understand this sentiment, but if SpaceX pulls this off, it's going to be an order of magnitude cheaper and more sustainable than the incredibly awesome but one-off and flashy Apollo (or even shuttle) missions.

Crew Dragon is not visually BIGGER than a Saturn V, but it is in a lot of ways a firmer footstep into space than we've ever taken before. SpaceX's program isn't going to dry up as soon as the cold war is over, and we stop devoting 5% of GDP to beating the Soviets. This is for real.

> it's going to be an order of magnitude cheaper

Soyuz is $60m per passenger I think? Are they saying dragon would be $6m per passenger per launch? I find that hard to believe...

Soyuz has done a good job of making spaceflight routine, but unfortunately it's a bit of a dead end (if only for political / organizational reasons, but also the technology hasn't been updated in decades).

I was directly comparing to the Shuttle, which cost more like $450mm per launch.

And yeah, maybe Crew Dragon won't drop to $6mm, but Starship (next) pretty plausibly could, if it works.

The RD-180 is an extremely high performance engine. It first flew in 2000.

I think that comment was aimed at the architecture. Soon all non-reusable systems will be out of date.

You cut off the bit where it was made clear that was in comparison to the Apollo and Shuttle missions. Please don’t knowingly take quotes out of context and use them like that. It’s really unpleasant behaviour.

Untrue, because:

60 years ago was 1960.

There were no space stations to dock with.

If your parents were American: no Americans had been in space.

But most importantly rockets were not reusable. That is why this has never been done before.

Untrue

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