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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why rocket development should be nearly as expensive as NASA makes it sound. It's mostly a plumbing problem, surely -- pump the fuel to the right place and let it burn. I'm sure there are a few added complexities, but the tricky bits were all figured out decades ago.

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Hey, now. Rockets have gimbals and nozzles and aerodynamic considerations. Rocket Science may not be as tough as NASA makes it out to be, but it definately involves advanced math and control systems and stuff like that.

Calling it as a plumbing problem is like calling software engineering a typing problem.

Winning the world 100m is just about running faster. A Nobel prize is won if you think just a little bit harder... Pushing the envelope has always been heroically hard and always will be.

SpaceX aren't pushing any envelopes. They're just doing what has already been done for decades, but for a lower price.

Edit: Instead of downvoting, how about replying? There are only 3 clauses above, so you can just say which one of those clauses is wrong and why.

Usain Bolt isn't pushing any envelopes. He's just doing what has already been done for decades, but at a higher speed.

Entirely true. Not sure of the relevance.

Seriously though, SpaceX isn't Usain Bolt, it's... Fabio Cerruti (of Italy, fifth-place getter in the first heat of the men's 100m at the 2008 Olympics). He ran 100m in 10.49 seconds, which is very impressive, but nothing that hasn't been done before.

OK, enough athletics analogies.

Sorry if it wasn't clear. To my understanding, "pushing the envelope" means just going a little bit further than anyone else has gone before. You obviously have a different definition.

So, if they are doing what has been done before for a lower price, then they are pushing the price/performance envelope?

The second two clauses contradict the first..

Do you consider the IBM PC something that pushed the envelope? Sometimes disrupting an industry by making its products available at a dramatically lower cost is just as much a push to the envelope in the real world as a new discovery. (Other examples include firms like 23andme etc)

Look at the comment I was replying to[1]. The author of that comment was using "pushing the envelope" to mean running faster in the 100m dash or winning a Nobel prize. Disrupting an industry, as SpaceX are doing, is extremely worthwhile, but no one has ever argued that the IBM PC was some sort of breakthrough in computing, or represented progress in programming techniques (quite the opposite in fact, it was cheap and took many shortcuts, resulting in the horrible situation we have in computing today).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2523927

At the time, the IBM PC was very impressive compared to the other microcomputers available.

I wonder if we'll look back at this a few years from now and say, "At the time, the iPad was very impressive compared to the other tablets available."

The way I remember it, the main thing it had going for it was that 'IBM' tag.

Its graphics were worse than that of the 4 year old Apple II, its speed was only a little higher (certainly way of from what the 1:4.77 clock speed ratio would make you think; both ran at around 1 MIPS).

Yes, it handled more than 64k RAM and was 16 bit-ish, but very impressive? Not in my memory.

The original 5150 PC had a wonderful keyboard. We'd consider it very heavy and loud today (each key had a spring beneath it, and made a very audible click when pressed), but compared to the other keyboards at the time, it was easily the best.

"SpaceX aren't pushing any envelopes. They're just doing what has already been done for decades, but for a lower price."

Logical fallacy. The fact that the differences in output are only quantitatively different doesn't mean that the differences in process aren't qualitatively different.

1. Yes, it is pushing envelopes. 2. Never been done by private industry. 3. Radically lower price.

Arianespace is a private company (admittedly with some government shareholders, but EADs is also a large shareholder) and it has been operating commercially since 1980 having done hundreds of launches:

http://www.arianespace.com/index/index.asp

It's also a risk-mitigation problem: making sure that nothing goes wrong with the solution to the plumbing problem.

NASA probably isn't optimally cost-effective, but I suspect that eats more money than the plumbing problem itself does.

The difference is that most plumbing problems result in nothing worse than loss of property and even truly egregious disasters might not make even the local news. Plumbing problems with manned rockets can result in deaths which are almost always international news.

Yes, and such failures are interpreted as a direct readout on our national technological capability and international prestige. It's nonsense to read so much into it, but that's how it works.

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