Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

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So what you fail to understand and much of the "govt waste" argument also fails to understand is that the government has funded the basic research and incredible high risk capital to do any the projects in the first place. With out the decades of work and capital that the R&D programs have built in this country none of SpaceX would be possible.

Everything that Elon has done has been piggybacked on the heavy lifting of the government. Most of all climate technology, space tech and the internet has been developed off their back and productionized (ie most of the technology is de-risked thanks to the fundamental research from the government).

This, frankly, unintelligent argument that the government is a waste of resources probably better represents your understanding of how difficult technology gets funded in the US. Critical word here is difficult (not some ad-tech SAS company).

FWIW the government has a ton of inefficiencies but their goal isn't to productionize something and turn it into a business.

This is ironically totally backwards.

The 20B+ / $2B/launch SLS program "innovation" is to not innovate! This is Apollo+, but heavier and in many ways worse and very expensive.

My own guess is that all in NASA / SLS cost per launch and program maint is probably on the range of $3B per launch if you look at the facilities list they have for this - which is super large.

Even weirder, NASA now says they want to be the anchor customer for 30 years of this boondoggle! Rather than just bidding out whatever heavy lift they need, they are going to get stuck with this crap for 30 years, which is a clear lock-in effort to avoid this thing getting cancelled out.

I mean is it the Apollo program? The spend for Apollo was $285B - during the whole Apollo period the spend at nasa was $482B. Not even on the same order of magnitude.

Basic research has nothing to do with the pork barrel boondoggle that is the SLS. SpaceX in the last decade has dramatically outdone NASA et. al[0] to the point of embarrassment. If building rockets and going to space was a football game, NASA vs. SpaceX is looking like Cumberland vs. Georgia Tech (0-222).

Frankly as someone who is on 'team USA' I'd like us to suck a lot less at building rockets[1].

[0]Who not only also benefit from all the same basic research, but have more direct and firsthand access.

[1]Among other things.

Elon is hyper focused on one task. Go to mars. Everything he is doing is that. Orbital network so you can talk to each other. Boring company to dig places to live as the surface is probably too harsh. Electric vehicles and solar to move around the surface. Reusable rockets to dramatically lower the costs going there and back. To move the amount of material to build a city there is going to be daunting the rocket cost was one of the large outliers. Think he said that cost had to come down 10-20x for him to make this happen. SpaceX is doing research and they are willing to blow up rockets to do that. NASA seems to have lost the taste for that years ago.

But SLS is not "basic research".

> but their goal isn't to productionize something and turn it into a business

Which means that you hate the government's recent plan to do just that with the SLS?

This does not explain why NASA of the 1960s was so dynamic and goal-oriented and lost that spirit in the following decades.

I still trust NASA when it comes to interplanetary probes and other basic research, but they stopped squeezing their suppliers (Boeing, Morton Thiokol etc.) for radically better launchers a long time ago. All improvement was very gradual. Which is not terrible in itself, but expendable rockets need reusable replacement very sorely. Fortunately, Falcon 9 seems to work very well.

I think no one, including Elon Musk, would claim that private space companies developed everything from scratch. They were obviously standing on the shoulders of giants. What is less fortunate is the fact that many of those giants were already dead.

Are you suggesting the Russian space program also "piggybacked" on the US government?

Is it not possible that SpaceX did what they did not because of the US government, but in fact, in _spite_ of it?

You may have this completely backwards.

Obviously the USSR and Russia space program is world-class. But they clearly took some cues from NASA*, albeit sometimes due to political pressure.

Just look at Buran- Brezhnev started the program as a direct response to the US Space Shuttle. The KGB and VPK spent a fortune hoovering up documents about the shuttle, and the resulting vehicle had clear similarities.

*And there have obviously been times where NASA drew on their work

Yeah but the actual rocket scientists didn't want anything to do with it. They basically said 'clearly this shuttle thing makes no sense what so ever for space flight, the only reason it could exist is to nuke us'. The Russians built their own because politicians wanted to match it.

Soviet engineers were clever and put built the rocket in a way where they could use it without the Orbiter and make the system much more useful then the Shuttle ever was.

But that was late in the game really, for the most part, in terms of engines the Soviets kicked the US ass.

The USSR/Russia had it's own many decades long R&D programmes.

We know for a fact SpaceX has benefited from NASA expertise because Elon has said so repeatedly and often, and the experienced designers and engineers he hired in the early days, some of whom are still there, cut their teeth in "old space". That's aside form the fact that much of what SpaceX has done has depended on NASA funding, including the couple of billion for lunar Starship.

And yet, weirdly enough, despite NASA's expertise, the launch vehicle most similar to Falcon 9 is...Russian Zenit.

Much of the technical assistance they got from NASA was on things like materials, techniques, testing, processes and such.

Didn't say anything about Russia, but certainly they did - competitors emulate.

So in terms of your SpaceX comment: They are certainly pushing the frontier on the heavy lifting of the decades of research and projects from the national research labs and NASA. The US government doesn't (afaik) have a mission to populate and develop mars - so that opening is available for Elon to pursue.

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