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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy to me that while we've been fantasizing about lunar bases, Mars settlements, asteroid mining and colony ships, now, 60+ years after our "space" era started, we still haven't figured out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient way. We all need a collective reality check on our spacefaring hopes.

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We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.

Documentation and old drawings, often lacking implementation details, can only take you so far

There's no big secret, if we do a thing a lot we will be able to do it consistently and reliably. Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.

Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.

> We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.

Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.

(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)

> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.

And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.

> Fortunately other companies, besides just SpaceX, are building lots of spacecraft.

I wouldn't say they do too much though.

In USA we have 1) Dragon - an overall good, rather conventional, rather modest in capabilities design. We also have 2) Lockheed's Orion, a rather capable, but quite, quite expensive design. 3) We also have Starliner, and I hope Boeing will at least try to support it, or better make it reliable enough; it's also rather modest, but much better than nothing. 4) We also have Dream Chaser... not quite have yet, and it's in cargo version for now, but still there's hope it will carry humans one day and will be successful. Better than many other designs, and of course not perfect. 5) We have Starship... maybe it will carry humans earlier than Dream Chaser, but that's still at least years away. It's a rather unique design, true. But quite unproven at the moment.

So... the best overall at the moment is still Dragon, and the best candidate to replace it is years away - I'd hope that would be Dream Chaser, though won't bet on it.

Overall... not too much I'd say. Just imagine yourself in place of those several companies which are building orbital stations today. What they're going to use?.. Do you see the problem?

There are lots of spacecraft being built, they just aren't all human rated at the moment. I should mention that I'm including first stages here too because my point is that we have to build the stuff to work the organizational muscles so that we can build more similar stuff which is better performing later.

Rocket lab is launching electron a bunch, working on Neutron which will be a falcon 9 competitor, and is building spacecraft for their customers (e.g. they built some Martian orbiters that should get launched later this year).

Intuitive machines, the folks who built the most recent US lunar lander.

Blue origin is not exactly speedy, but they do fly their rockets semi-regularly now and New Glenn is supposed to fly later this year.

Northrup has a human-rated rocket that flies periodically.

And of course there's ULA.

And those are just the successful ones.

There's also: Astra ABL Firefly Relativity Sierra Space

And probably some more that I'm not aware of.

That's a pretty long list of places that are working on these problems and paying American engineers to work on and think about these problems.

We also have X-37 the military space plane, although that’s for the military.

X-33 was a thing, Venturestar by Lockheed. It seemed tantalising in close, a few mishaps and it was cancelled, but surely that would have been worth picking and taking that bit further.

X-37 is too light to carry humans. X-33 was a good idea... with less than adequate implementation, I guess...

No, X-33 was also a bad idea. SSTO is not the way to go.

Starship is rather similar to ASSTO actually.

Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft. Besides that, iirc one proposal is basically a "basic" cylinder which relies on a docked Dragon to support it. Starship is in an interesting spot because in a sense it's a station in itself. Starship deployable stations currently have the problem that the payload bay opening mechanism and volume aren't set in stone yet.

> Most of the companies with actual money behind their space station proposals seem to intend to use the IDSS, so theoretically they'd be able to take either of the commercial crew spacecraft.

Right, but to be practical, those commercial crew spacecrafts should exist in sufficient numbers to ensure the orbital stations are supplied, preferably without exorbitant price tags, which an insufficient supply could result in.

Agreed, so far, SpaceX seems to be fine with building more Dragons, I had been assuming they were just refitting the 3 they built initially for the free-flying missions, but turns out they have 5 in service at the moment. Boeing seems to have decided to stop at 2 Starliners, and of course too early to say about fleet size for Dreamchaser.

One could argue that shuttle program didn't end up as successful as was originally hoped, but it is certainly “serious space development”.

"Not as successful as was originally hoped" is quite an understatement. The program missed all of its economical and operational targets (reliability, cost per kg in orbit, launch frequency) by a factor of one hundred. It was supposed to usher in a new era of scientific, commercial and civilian spaceflight, and competing programs were cancelled and deprioritized because they were about to be obsoleted by this amazing new reusable space lauch system. What it ended up being, instead, was an epic exercise in space budget whoring, which continues to this day with the Artemis program that insists on "reusing" Space Shuttle derived hardware for that exact reason.

It spent way more money than initially planned, while doing so consistently over decades, and in all the right congressional districts.

It was wildly successful.

You're just under the mistaken impression that the goal was to go to space cheaply or whatever.

But the success of the shuttle program pales in comparison to the SLS and Artemis.

Now they're spending more money in all the right places, without that pesky distraction of launching the thing into space.

Sure, if you define "successful" in the most cynical way possible. I don't disagree with you at all that many projects (even many non-space-related) are just jobs programs masquerading as "progress" or "research" or whatever.

But so what? I don't care about that measure of "success". I care about reliable, reusable, cost-efficient space launches, and all the technological and scientific advances that can bring. By those measures, the space shuttle was a disaster of a failure. That's what we care about.

> You're just under the mistaken impression that the goal was to go to space cheaply or whatever.

You're way off in the wonderland considering the goals and achievements. Just remember who's the actual goal setter is. Don't fool yourself.

It explored an idea that ended up being a dead end. But we only know it in hindsight. Decisions need to be judged given the information available at the time. Was there a consensus that shuttle was a bad design at the time? Was it obvious that it will be the case?

Obviously it was not known from the beginning that it would be a dead end. However, engineers have this blind spot for keeping track of bigger-picture objectives, as opposed to technical specifications. If you set out to build a lawn mower, and end up with a rubber duck, this will be deemed a failure. But if you do build the lawn mower, all is good. Even if it costs a million dollars, and all the lawns in the country remain unmowed (except for a handful of government properties). So long as someone is paying for continued development, where's the problem?

In other words, a lot of such government-backed projects utterly fail in their objectives, not so much due to lack of prophetic foresight, but due to inability to re-evaluate when it becomes clear that the previously chosen approach can no longer lead to the envisioned outcome. ITER is another fine example of this.

The first space shuttle prototype (Enterprise) started construction in 1974. The first shuttle launched in 1981. To the best of my knowledge, there were no major upgrades to the design over its career, save avionics. So even though the space shuttle was “serious space development,” it’s been a long time since a new human rated vehicle has been designed.

It was also initially designed to be able to have nuclear thermal propulsion engines installed in later iterations, but that got scrapped.

Those were for the other type(s) of shuttles, for use in space. (The ones that didn't get built).

The original STS design looked a lot more like late-game KSP1 (possibly depending on the player).

Well, Orion was developed.

Yes, also there's a world of difference between a single extremely hard to repeat mission whose only purpose was to win the race to the Moon at any cost for reasons that had more to do with politics than engineering (not to dismiss the huge engineering accomplishments, my point should be clear) and something whose plan is to send stuff in orbit every week and potentially people every month with the goal to do the same on the Moon very soon and Mars in less than a couple decades. The great accomplishment today isn't reaching a higher orbit than in the 60s, but doing the same every damn month, with significant cargo capabilities, and safely. One can't build a Moon base by sending up there a bag of screws every six months.

The total cost of the shuttle was around $200 billion. A Saturn V launch was around $1.2 billion (today's dollars).

The Saturn V could get 44.5 tons to the moon.

So instead of the shuttle program we could have had whatever amount of moon base you'd get with just under 7500 tons on the moon.

And that's assuming a very expensive Saturn V, in reality the system would have become cheaper over time due to optimization and amortization.

What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.

You learn to do things better by doing it repeatedly. The best way to build up to weekly launches is to do it more and more and more often, which is exactly what SpaceX has done.

Stopping the funding that NASA was getting at the time is the reason we lost those institutional muscles and stopped building them up.

> What do you mean a "single mission", Apollo put astronauts on the moon 6 times and orbited it another 2 times.

Possible bad wording on my part. I meant that the cost was hardly sustainable in a long run, so that once it was clear that the US had won the race to the Moon, the lack of significant incentives doomed the project because of high cost compared to the return. Back then there was no or very little interest in placing commercial satellites in orbit and nobody cared about Mars. The shuttle was different as it served as a lab and carrier to put satellites in orbit, and more importantly (replying also to avar here) disasters aside one would still have the shuttle returning after each launch, while every single Saturn V had to be rebuilt. I believe the move to a reusable carrier was obligatory to make short term launches feasible economically, which is what the Shuttle started and now SpaceX is continuing.

The shuttle could get 24 tons to orbit, Saturn V could deliver 130 tons.

The per launch cost was the same when dividing the overall cost by the number of launches. Saturn V launched 13 times, the shuttle 135 times.

There's just no way to rationalize the whole project not being a terrible idea from beginning to end.

I don't buy that the cost was unsustainable. All that money being spent was going directly into the American economy and was stimulating technological development all over the country.

The story that NASA was too expensive during Apollo sounds like political spin to me.

Apollo's single mission was "get to the moon", which it performed admirably more than once. Skylab was an attempt at a secondary mission; others were canceled in early planning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Post-Apollo_proposal).

IMO the shuttle program did a decent job of preserving American human-spaceflight know-how, especially when measured against what it was feasible to accomplish at the time.

The true problem is that the US government stopped funding space in a serious way and so NASA did not continue pushing the envelope at the rate they did before. We've had some pretty great robotic missions in that time though.

No, the true problem was that the Shuttle program was just a terrible idea. Alternatives (like economical expendable launchers, or even just evolving Saturn) would have been much better.

Agreed. NASA's budget got cut to such extreme degrees that compromises that looked to some like the program would get cheaper were made.

The shuttle program had several problems, but perhaps the biggest was something of a "design by committee" issue. Too many interested parties wanted it to do too many things, making it somewhere between bad and mediocre at all of them, to say nothing of the costs.

To build reliable, economical rockets and spacecraft (at least those burdened with the task of escaping Earth's gravity well), you need to be able to intensely specialize and streamline them to the greatest degree possible, with what complexity remains pulling its own weight several times over. They need to be really good at one thing, with any other use cases coming as a bonus.

That's not even the root cause. The need for so many parties came from the need for a large enough market to justify the program. And the need for a large market came from the large cost of developing the launcher. And that came from the top down decision for reusability combined with overall inefficiency of the NASA-industry development system. And that is sourced back to Congress viewing NASA and space spending primarily as a pork delivery vehicle, not as an effort intended to achieve real results as economically as possible.

It took SpaceX to slash costs, accelerate development, and choose an approach that really made engineering success to push partial reusability over the finish line. SpaceX was not subject to the perverse incentives under which NASA is forced to operate.

Given that SpaceX is about to launch four people on what is more-or-less a joyride (Polaris Dawn), it's really only the government and boeing that seem to be having problems.

> it's really only the government and boeing that seem to be having problems.

As we've seen these past few years, Boeing is perfectly capable of royally screwing things up on its own without the government's involvement.

The problem isn't government meddling, but the government creating perverse incentives. Boeing has an extremely strong relationship with the government, which means they get sent endless billions of dollars with quality being only a distant concern. Because it's not like Congress cares about space - NASA is just seen as a convenient jobs/pork medium. So long as money gets redirected to the right people, they're happy. And so maintaining this relationship, and milking it for all it's worth, becomes much more profitable and reliable than trying to compete, innovate, and bring down prices. On the contrary, high prices and long development times just drive even more profit. Most of their contracts have been cost plus where the government pays for all costs and then gives them a fat chunk of profit on top. Even the fixed price contracts tend to end up getting 'adjusted' over time.

Any company solely motivated by profit would probably be destroyed in this system, because the incentives created do not reward competence.

Whether it's in the public or in the private sector, the real problem is a lack of competent leadership. At some point we started respecting the person with the most profitable hustle more than the person showing actual competence and integrity.

Right, the public-sector government becomes afraid to take risks for political reasons. On the other hand, the publicly traded private sector over-optimizes for shareholder value, putting the cart of gold before the horse; Boeing.

SpaceX remains a private company solely focused on their mission undeterred by outside influence which allows engineers the space to do what they do best.

There’s a difference and anything that’s truly critical to our lives or human livelihood should consider delisting. Once shareholders demand your company to stray from excellence and quality in the name of raising the bottom line, it’s time to give it a hard look.

Private companies have shareholders as well.

As a (very) small shareholder in SpaceX, I can tell you, it's Elon (and Gwynne's) game, full stop. I would be very surprised to learn an investor has even a tiny bit of influence at SpaceX.

SpaceX exists because of that government's significant funding of the company and the prescient decision to award multiple (fixed-price!) Commercial Cargo/Crew contracts.

It is undeniable that NASA/NROL/USAF contracts and support benefited spaceX especially early on .

However their commercial launch business is still considerably larger than what US gov gives them and always has been , it is possible and quite likely they would have existed as a successful commercial space launch company without government contracts , albeit smaller and perhaps slower to reach many milestones .

I can also argue reasonably that many things US government wants is not useful (or simply restricted) for other customers and building those features were and are a distraction.

No different for a startup to have a very large customer who has all sorts of customization needs that no other customer will focusing on that can kill the company as ULA and Boeing space are feeling today.

SpaceX is successful because they don’t need government support not because of it, they can build starship without waiting for a nasa mission and not even using VC money but just money from their revenues .

> it is possible and quite likely they would have existed as a successful commercial space launch company without government contracts...

Even Musk doesn't make that claim.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/29/elon-musk-9-years-ago-spacex...

"“I messed up the first three launches. The first three launches failed. And fortunately the fourth launch, which was, that was the last money that we had for Falcon 1. That fourth launch worked. Or it would have been — that would have been it for SpaceX. But fate liked us that day. So, the fourth launch worked,” says Musk."

Flights one, two, and three all involved government funding (Air Force and DARPA payloads).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RatSat#Aftermath

"Even though SpaceX finally has achieved a successful orbital flight, Musk only has $30 million left and was unable to support both SpaceX and Tesla for two months. Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts. Through 2008, SpaceX launch manifest at the time only consisted of RazakSAT. Rather, it was NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services and subsequent Commercial Resupply Services contracts that provided SpaceX much-needed fund to save it from bankruptcy."

Don't forget SpaceX was the first private company which achieved orbit without external money, and did that for awfully less money than e.g. Air Force thought possible.

Give the credit where it's due, as they say.

> Don't forget SpaceX was the first private company which achieved orbit without external money...

No; SpaceX received DARPA (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060048219/downloads/20...), Air Force (https://www.space.com/2196-spacex-inaugural-falcon-1-rocket-...), and NASA funding (COTS, in 2006) prior to their first orbital success with Falcon 1.

Thanks for the links. I can't find in the article how much DARPA gave SpaceX, in dollars, and the second link talks about payment for the launch, not the grant.

    The mission carried a $6.7 million price tag covered by the U.S. Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

How big share of about AFAIK $90 millions spent on Falcon-1 program was from SpaceX investor(s) and how big was from external sources? In other words, how material was that external funding?

I think it stands to reason that if they were nearly bankrupt after flight floor, having to self-fund flights one, two, and three would have definitely bankrupted them.

I think they had money to make up to 4 flights. Looks like they got some money even before the flight 4, but not sure how much compared to their own expenses.

> SpaceX exists because of that government's significant funding of the company and the prescient decision to award multiple (fixed-price!) Commercial Cargo/Crew contracts.

This was the claim of OP I replied to, Are we not moving the goal posts here? Government support for early stage startups is absolutely not what OP claimed

DARPA AND USAF funding is important and also available to many companies before and since, the size of them is however not significant in comparison to what it takes to run a rocket company or even R&D.

> Contrary to popular belief, Falcon 1's flight 4 did not directly lead to more customer contracts ...

> Even Musk doesn't make that claim.

In the alternate reality where Falcon 4 succeeded but there were no COTS and CRS , would SpaceX have survived? Yes I think so, Musk would not have been able to keep it funded personally yes, but it is hard to see the first private rocket company with a functional rocket not being able to raise any money from investors at all.

We can of course argue how much Musk loosing partial control would have affected the trajectory of the company, quite possible they won't be where they are today without singular focus he was able to drive in the company, who is to say ? but they would likely be still here. It is also possible that Musk is talented and effective enough even with constraints external investors would have been still able to achieve the same kind of things, keep in mind SpaceX does have lot of external investors and raised outside money heavily in the last 15 years including a $1Billion from Google in 2015, Musk has been able to operate with that so not that far fetched.

---

Nobody is denying that US Gov has been instrumental in the success of SpaceX and rocketry in general. After all even with zero government support, SpaceX would still need the rich talent pool US Gov developed and allowed to work in the private sector to build a rocket at all.

The point is how much the revenue from Government launches helps/helped not how they has helped at all. US Gov is a large customer but not so large that loosing those contracts would make the TAM impossibly small, there is enough business outside to make it viable business not just attractive but viable nonetheless.

A big chunk of Starship funding is coming from NASA for the Artemis HLS.

https://spacenews.com/nasa-awards-spacex-1-15-billion-contra...

So, two flights to the Moon - ~$4B. SpaceX already spent around that on the developments in Boca Chica, each flight - expendable - is estimated at $0.1B, we already had 4 and they are surely more costly. We still have to have 2 HLS to fly and 20-30 Starship flights to refuel them, and that's the lower bound in expenses.

Big chunk, likely. But definitely not nearly all the money.

That's an interesting cost-based criticism of Starship. I hope you are wrong and SpaceX can actually do this profitably, otherwise its potential will be much reduced.

The development is what already being spent... Each flight, after development is complete, will be reusable - that's the plan - and will cost less than $0.1B == 100 millions dollars, if total per-Starship expenses are divided into the total number of that Starship flights. Yes, I hope the eventual costs per flight would be lower, the point is the cost of the program is surely way more than $4B.

All space companies exist for that reason. Especially Boeing.

SpaceX just happens to be the best in every aspect.

and the government should continue to fund private enterprise for innovation.

much of the billions for a charger network for EVs has made <10 chargers, they could have provided that to Tesla. similarly the EV tax credits provided to private companies has fueled EV proliferation

The charger thing is misleading. The money hasn't been spent yet, it goes to states to use, and the goal is 2030.

https://www.factcheck.org/2024/08/trump-misleads-on-the-cost...

> Just looking at the $5 billion program dedicated to building charging stations along major highways, Nigro said updated data from 10 states shows the government’s share of building each port is $150,000, on average. That works out to more than 30,000 ports and as many as 7,500 stations, assuming each has four ports (Nigro said the station number will likely be lower, since many stations will have more ports). Even more charging stations and ports can be built with the other $2.5 billion.

They did Tesla an enormous favor by pushing the other car manufacturers to adopt their standard. A good use of government power, IMO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Charging_Standa...

> The charger thing is misleading. The money hasn't been spent yet

Not certain if that is any better. If an organization can't execute, it can't execute. It doesn't matter if it is some frankenstein of Boeing prime contractor and Rocketjet subcontractor or Federal and States.

Sure, and if we’re still at ten completed charging stations in a few years, I’m happy to criticize.

I think that’s unlikely.

Phase one is “submit your plans”. Phase two is “we review, approve, and fund your plans”. I’m not surprised these have taken a while to coordinate across 50 state governments.

2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal, it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.

The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years. He said most will be coming online 2027+ but seemed to admit that the expectation was for more to be online by now. While I agree the "9 stations for $7.5B" there are reasonable concerns here that the money will be well-spent. I can't even find anything on how much has been actually allocated to far and how many chargers are expected.

https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/02_22_24_Letter_to_Sec...

> 2030 for 500K chargers is just separate political goal, it isn't connected to the $7.5B allocated by the bill.

Yes, it is. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/05/congress-ev-charger... "Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure package into law in 2021 with $7.5 billion specifically directed toward EV chargers, with an eye toward achieving his goal of building 500,000 chargers in the United States by 2030."

> The bill allocates $7.5B over 5 years.

Yes, to hand out to the states. Who then get to spend it on projects. Allocation is the start of the project, not the end.

https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/12744

"FHWA must distribute the NEVI Program Formula Program funds made available each fiscal year (FY) through FY 2026, so that each state receives an amount equal to the state FHWA funding formula determined by 23 U.S. Code 104. To receive funding, states must submit plans to the FHWA and the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation for review and public posting annually, describing how the state intends to distribute NEVI funds. The FHWA announced approval of all initial state plans on September 27, 2022, and FY2024 plans were approved in 2023."

> https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/02_22_24_Letter_to_Sec...

You'll find me fairly unconvinced by a letter from Republican House Representatives to Biden. (You probably would find a letter from Democratic reps to Trump similarly useless as evidence.)

Incorrect.

The number of stations does not appear in the bill.

https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ58/PLAW-117publ58.pdf

The 500,000 charger was a campaign promise in 2020 not directly connected to the funding allocated in 2021

https://grist.org/energy/biden-wants-to-build-500000-ev-char...

How does the government determine where to put all these new chargers?

The dataset is publicly available. https://data.nrel.gov/submissions/214

https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2023/building-the-2030-nat...

Turning Elon Musk into the richest person on earth was a US government project on the same kind of scale as the TVA and Apollo program. It’s actually kinda funny when you think about it.

This is reductive, in the extreme, to the point of being incorrect. SpaceX had to sue to win its first contracts, Tesla was actively cut out of Biden administration EV programs and awards. Whatever success they've had, they have absolutely earned.

> Tesla was actively cut out of Biden administration EV programs and awards

Incidentally this was the inception of the Tech Right. Before that, Elon exclusively voted for Democrats.

I didn't realize the impact back then: https://x.com/mualphaxi/status/1817562306764566824

the command of critical projects Elon has is unnatural. He builds his massive projects with no permits or regulatory approvals; see: - the massive supercomputer in Memphis, no power power approval from TVA and did do an EIA. The city council never new about the project.

- Starship and Starbase, no lauch approval

- Tesla FSD, no regulatory approval

-Starlink version 2 upgrade, the competition is still fight. Again, no approval

and many more.. all this projects a massive like really massive.. True Elon is a government project.

Starship and Starbase both required extensive government approvals, including for each launch so far.

It'll include the first commercial space walk ever. Calling that a joy-ride either trivializes an epic accomplishment or correctly describes a joy-ride of the gods. Helios' daily commute, but faster.

> correctly describes a joy-ride of the gods.

Pretty much this. Polaris Dawn is happening because Jared Isaacman wanted it to. And my point is that SpaceX has gotten the price down to the point where he was able to afford multiple trips.

The government (NASA with their commercial space effort) is the reason there's a SpaceX and a dragon to be available as backup. The government seems to be doing alright here.

SpaceX will lose a vehicle. Not a question of if, rather one of when.

relax! i am not saying Elon isn't the greatest engineer ever, and SpaceX is not a great company.

space flight is a dangerous business.

The Russians haven't lost a vehicle.

Err ... Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 ?

OceanGate launched three people on a joyride to the bottom of the ocean and the sub imploded.

Rich people being willing to spend buckets of money on an experience is not evidence that it is "safe" or "cost effective", it's just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with.

> "cost effective"

Jet set was a thing in 50/60s Jet travel was viewed as a play thing for the extremely rich . Even today there is staggering 80% of the world population who have never flown in airplane ever in their life[1].

From the perspective of that 80% they can say airplanes are "just evidence that there are people in the world with more money than they know what to do with".

It takes a long long time for transportation to become affordable. What SpaceX has done so far is just make it a bit cheaper to make it possible for civilians to be able to even pay any money and do this. No innovation will be ever enough, that doesn't mean we demean it.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/07/boeing-ceo-80-percent-of-peo...

I'm not demeaning anything, I'm just pointing out that OP's argument makes no sense. There may be other evidence that SpaceX is safe and cost effective, but rich people paying them to go to space is not it.

Would the fact that the FAA granted SpaceX permission to launch civilians to space not speak towards the safety of the craft?

You seem to be unaware that the Soyuz system has been safely moving people back and forth to LEO for decades. SpaceX has been doing it since 2020. This failure should only be taken as a comment on Boeing's broken engineering processes and incompetent management. It says nothing about our society's spacefaring capabilities.

Also:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhou_(spacecraft)

Yes, my bad. Thanks.

This is an absurd statement. There are currently three operational spacecraft that have been safely and reliably ferrying people back and forth from LEO for years now: Soyuz, Dragon, and Shenzhou. This is a test flight for a fourth spacecraft.

We get people to and from low earth orbit safely and (relative to the 60’s) cost efficiently all the time. One failure isn’t an indictment of the whole industry, any more than one broken down car negates how much better cars are today than in the past.

And it wasn't even a real failure; they contractually have to provide something like a 1 in 200 chance of failure or better, and in the state the vehicle is in they haven't or can't prove that they're meeting that safety margin, so NASA is choosing to go with an option that does have that safety margin. That's it. If they were to come down in it anyways there's still likely a 1% or less chance of failure.

I agree. It reminds me that it is now 6,000+ years (at least) since our agricultural era started, and we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.

> we still haven't figured out how to provide a decend meal every day for all the children on our spaceship Earth.

We produce more than enough food to feed every person on Earth and then a few billion more in the future. We simply choose not to. It isn't a technological or logistical issue, but cultural and political.

Yes indeed. It shows the importance of cultural and political issues in everything. And not least in space flight. See the motivation behind the Apollo programme in the past or who might be part of the next Crew-9 mission in the current situation.

And that a brand new company offers the only U.S.-based method for doing so, when NASA and these other companies have been at this since roughly World War II!

It's embarrassing for the legacy space industry.

Not to downplay the legacy space industry's amazing achievements like some armchair general (literally typing this from my couch...)

But, I'm shocked at how badly SpaceX is beating the incumbents.

This is like the difference between electrical engineering and software engineering. It’s just so more expensive to create and test anything in EE so development cycles are much longer. Compare that to software engineering where people are trying and making new paradigms like every week.

Space engineering is wildly more expensive so development and progress cycles are even longer.

The same goes for secure and bug free software development (while the cost of errors in software rise all the time)

Looking at transportation, noise and air pollution or medicine as other examples: We are still just really bad at most things, if you consider how little fantasy is required to find major fault in our important systems.

Space flight is not even that, just really exposed.

I fully agree. Personally I don't think we'll ever have an extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon. We might visit Mars in the next century, maybe, but a colony surviving there is pure fantasy.

It's been 63 years ago since the first human visited the orbit around earth. Since then, development and research happens faster and faster. We now even have commercial companies who are developing space crafts for humans.

I don't think we've seen even the beginning of how things will unfold. Just 100 years will render a huge difference from today, and today we're already doing things that were unthinkable ~20 years ago (like reusable rockets).

Commercial space flight will become mainstream as soon as it becomes viable to profit from it. Probably via asteroid or moon mining. At that point motivation to be in space will hit its peak. Let's not forget why humans went to orbit and the moon in the first place.

> Let's not forget why humans went into orbit and the moon in the first place.

Political propaganda?

manifesting as real motivation

In other words, we are almost as far away from moon landings as they were from Wright brothers first flight. Not particularly optimistic.

Just a couple hundred years ago, Settlers who risked their lives and spent several months on cutting edge technology (aka wooden sail boats) to find “new” land would like to have a word.

It's also a bit poetic in that it took 30-60 days to sail from Europe to the New World. When Mars is aligned with Earth, the travel time will be similar. For example, New Horizons was able to reach Mars in 39 days.

Am I missing something? New Horizons didn’t go to Mars, right? According to this, it also crossed the orbit of mars 78 days after launch, and at that point, it was closer to earth than mars:

https://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=0...

Something going that fast would not be able to slow down any kind of useful payload into Mars orbit with current propulsion technology.

I'm with you. Unfortunately. The older I get, the more I realise just how hard, far and pointless existing beyond the Earth's atmosphere will be, for the most part.

Certainly the next few hundred years. There's just no real point. Ten thousand years hence, who knows?

I'm absolutely rapt following SpaceX's journey, but then when I mentally scale that up to 'something useful' for localspace living (eg. a useful percentage of current daily aviation volume), I realise how utterly unsustainable it fundamentally is.

The older I get, the less of a Paradox Fermi's idle thought becomes. Sadly.

> Personally I don't think we'll ever have an extended manned presence anywhere farther away than the Moon

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

Given how much future is left (a whole lot), I don't really understand why some people seem so confident that humanity is just going to stay on Earth forever. Are you assuming industrial civilization will collapse? It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's a given.

Why are we gonna sustain a presence on the moon?

We might. I'm not saying we will. Neither place is habitable without exhorbitant levels of support and expense, but the moon is far closer.

SpaceX is solving this and many similar issues.

we haven't? isn't this exclusively a Boeing issue? SpaceX should just get the whole contract.

SpaceX effectively does already. NASA has already bought extra flights from them. It seems likely they'll buy more now.

Why would they buy more? They can’t even get the already booked flights done before the ISS is deorbited

NASA likely will now need to replace the remaining Starliner missions on the schedule.

Replacing missions isn’t exactly buying more though, right? The total number of planned missions didn’t increase?

Sure. NASA will cancel Starliner flights, and replace them with newly purchased SpaceX ones. They are going to be buying more SpaceX launches.

Ah, I somehow misread the initial comment and thought you said that they bought more Starliner launches. Sorry for that.

Does spacex not exist in your world or what?

we need more than one spacex.

We have Ariane space, rocket lab, blue origin.

We need more than one musk. Unfortunately that’s like one in a century.

I see you mistyped Shotwell.

she is good too. but musk did 0->1 work. She did everything else

Even Musk isn't Musk anymore.

He does not have a personally consistent track record but his company SpaceX seems to be executing just as good if not even better than it ever has.

It’s all good until he has his Spacex Cybertruck moment.

People have been waiting for that like forever. It may happen, it may not. I spoke to multiple SpaceX employees post Musk twitter and they are as committed as ever with an insane amount of dedication to the cause...so if he does not lose his top talent, the likelihood of screwups like what you are describing seem small.

He’s our generation’s Howard Hughes. One Ket trip away from becoming a recluse, shuffling around with kleenex boxes for slippers muttering about being unclean and denouncing conspiracies against him.

> One Ket trip away from becoming a recluse

This was literally debunked by nasa but I’m so glad HN is so captured by anti musk narratives it’s impossible to post anything good about him with getting downvoted.

Pretty sad state of affairs.

Musk almost bankrupted both SpaceX and Tesla, He was more lucky than good.

That appears to be answering a question orthogonal to:

> we still haven't figured out how to get a single person to low Earth orbit and back in a safe and cost efficient way

I agree. You are free to start one too~

It helps to inherit wealth.

We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been focusing on since the late 60's.

The world is not mobilizing towards these big "civilization advancing" goals, we're all just faffing about solving the next tiny little thing infront of our faces. That plus we're breeding mediocrity and not promoting excellence through meritocracy. This is purely cultural, and it's right infront of us every day to see and participate in (or not).

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