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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

Who would have known the SpaceX experiment would work? There is some case to be made that US Gov was overly conservative and not willing to innovate, but I suspect that's safer than using taxpayer money on a SpaceX-like iniative that suffers as many failures as SpaceX did initially. Can you imagine the political fallout? We don't have an appetite for that from the Gov any more, not like we did in decades past.

NASA and the US Gov made the decision to fill a strategic gap the only way they knew how (and the way that had worked in the past). Now, other options are emerging, but not available and certainly not certified.

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While it might not have been known that SpaceX would work, it's been known since the 1960s that cost optimized launchers could be much cheaper than what was being done. Arthur Schnitt's MCD design philosophy dates from the late 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_dumb_booster

One of the tragedies of the Shuttle program was that it was pursued instead of this. Simply cost optimizing and evolving the Saturn 1B could have led to something a lot like the Falcon 9 (perhaps not with the reusability, at least at first), years before SpaceX.

Personally, It smacked me in the face as obviously going to eat the rocket industry's lunch in 2013 with Falcon 9 v1.1. Cost optimised boosters while testing landing tech on paying commercial flights was a no brainer.

Only reason SpaceX exists is because of the US Gov commercial programs. They wanted to create a more robust private space industry and they did it. Tax payer money was spent on SpaceX as the US Gov was the biggest customer for a long time. This is what governments do, they create markets. It was intentional and it worked just like it did countless times in the past.

Literally anyone familiar with politics and economics.

At a fundamental level, industry responds to price incentives and government responds to political incentives.

Ten years ago, it was unknown if the technology behind SpaceX would pan out. No one doubted that the economics would work if the technology also did.

I didn't think the early SpaceX rockets did much that was technologically novel.

The real reason why everyone expected the commercial crew program to turn into big contractor grift is because they saw the same story play out 100 times before and 100 of those times the big contractors found a way to capture the money and send the project into development hell. The 101st time was different.

The non-governmental market size for conventional super-heavy launch vehicles is zero.

I think this is a textbook example of hindsight being 2020. Of course it's obvious now.

Governments create markets. They create the games. People like Musk just plays them.

everyone and their grandma, including some of SpaceX's biggest supporters thought spacex would fail. your statement is hyperbole

There are space companies other than SpaceX which participated in the same contracts and were nowhere nearly as successful.

* Boeing did not yet deliver commercial crew. * Antares rocket did not expand beyond ISS delivery. * Blue Origin is not yet flying, despite immense funding. * Virgin Galactic did not yet fly any customers.

The other great space launch success in the last decade was RocketLab but they're far too small to be relevant to SLS.

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