They developed a new rocket engine and the ability to land upright, both significant engineering challenges, which it seems is what the problem is currently for fusion (i.e., we need to build and iterate on things that mostly seem they should work)
Disagree, the theory of full-flow gas generators, and test bench results, were known for many years. At the same time with fusion we only have experience with uncontrolled one (bombs), or theory of how stars operate (and we can't reproduce that mechanism, not enough gravity). There is a lot more science to discover in fusion than in Raptors.
The analogy holds!
Starting fusion isn't easy, but as I understand it, that's not even the hard part. Containment is the big deal, because of the energy needed.
If you take 800 cubic meters of plasma from the core of the Sun, about the same volume as ITER, it only produces 216 kW - comparable to the engine in your car.
And in that volume, you will have an average rate of 1500 hydrogen fusion reactions per second. Compared to ITER, this is something like twelve orders of magnitude slower. That is why ITER needs to go to much higher temperatures than the sun.
The power density is correct, but the number of reactions is too low by a factor of 10^10...
Getting fusion energy without gravitational confinement is the tricky bit.
You can't iterate your way from fission to fusion, but you can iterate your way from the Merlin to the Raptor.
The Raptor which, by the way, is not even that far ahead of what came before it.
In some sense Earth science had practically do that - from Goddard's 1926 pressure-fed/piston pumps feed via von Braun's open loop of 1944, via Isayev-Melnikov staged combustion of 1949-1959 to Glushko's full-flow combustion of 1967.
Slow, and engines were designed from scratch. But still some iterations and evolution.
Hopefully you (like me) were one of the ones cheering them on, but achievements that seem obvious in reterospect usually have had notoriously shaky statements about how obvious they were.
Obviously the proponents are vindicated today, but it becomes a dodgy game of definitions when talking about how everyone who really had any insight knew that it was inevitable.
https://spacenews.com/38891a-hat-tip-to-spacex-as-rebranded-...
What's fascinating about this is how NO ONE was talking about them getting the first stage to be reusable. Musk's plan looks like it exploited this blind spot. Reusing the first stage was so obviously impossible that even with the evidence of nine first stage engines staring them in the face, they thought this was just to minimize development cost. It was only when the legs went on that the penny dropped.
And now, no one else will be able to repeat the free R&D flights that SpaceX got by trying to recover first stages off expendable launches sold at expendable launcher prices.
One really has to be meticulous to stay honest when looking at things in reterospect. And, by extension, when looking at lofty-sounding predictions about the future.
Fusion power still needs to overcome fundamental, hard physics problems.
Talk to someone in physics closer to this. The time scales ITER is operating on are so long term the tech is ancient by the the time they are actually operating it and the path to commercial power is - basically not there I think.
It is a research reactor. It goes first to prove it is at least possible to build a power producing reactor. That's all it has to do. Just exist.
Progress in computer science, and the absurd utility of data handling improvements to other fields, has created an extremely unrealistic expectation in the minds of computer tech adjacent professionals about how quickly technology can actually develop, because the core technology of computing (more transistors) had a long period of exponential improvement due to the nature of how it's produced (lithography on 2D surfaces). Feature size shrinks give you exponential improvements.
But that period is ending for computing - there's no more room left in the silicon chip regime to keep doing it much past 6nm. And progress in other fields enjoys no such advantages: cellular biology for example, can't exponentially increase the time it to takes to grow a culture. They also can't shrink it easily - scaling biological research generally involves just scaling in size - facilities, space, grad students, everything. It is much more linear - there are very few easy wins beyond what improved informatics handling gave us (and where we did get big wins was the same mechanism - the availability of cheap silicon handling led to a rush to look for ways to capitalize on cheap silicon handling).
There's a reason computing is powering better surveillance, but brain-computer interface technology is moving exactly as fast as there are people working in the field, doing experiments, developing technology and doing slow, uncool research like patch-clamping single cells or whatever. Because the fundamentals are diverse, and there is no one single technical improvement which gives you a big scaling improvement (and everyone is hoping they'll find one).
Also Blue Origin actually did propulsive sub-orbital landing from space to Earth before SpaceX, although admittedly from a lower altitude and velocity. Both came after the 1990s era Delta Clipper. Before that there were probably a lot of Apollo era test vehicles.
Each one got a bit higher and faster. This is the value SpaceX offers. They're doing the hard work of making things we know are possible also commercially viable.
They plan to land the 2nd stage of starship, which will have reached orbital speeds. But that is a huge challenge that they have not attempted yet.
The first ones that did, by the way, are the Soviets in the early 70s.
If you mean space probes it’s actually more impressive, the Soviets landed a probe on the moon in 1966: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_9
Also since we are already speaking extra terrestrially Apollo 11 landed propulsively in 1969, with humans on board and it got back to orbit!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_1#Lander
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3#Entry,_descent,_landing...