> Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again.
Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
If it had been left to the engineers in 1970s NASA and not to anti-science Republican cranks and crooks like Nixon and Proxmire, we would absolutely would have had a moon base and Mars landings long before now.
Good things can happen in the private sector or the public sector. SpaceX is a good thing happening in the private sector. No one's brain has to go running to Republican-bashing and history compression to counterbalance that to avoid thinking new thoughts.
> "break[ing] something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is."
It is possible that this will occur going forward now that Elon is a de facto government official, though. Also, the engineers in 1970s NASA are what created the Space Shuttle.
Uh, SpaceX didn't come into being until 2002. And the Space Shuttle was not in any way cheap, nor a pile of things we did with it. Nor did the US Government in any way subsidize SpaceX, anymore then it "subsidizes" paper manufacturers by... ordering paper for its printers. It contracted with SpaceX for commercial services at a fixed price, and has saved billions and billions of dollars as a result. You seem a touch confused on timelines here.
And my entire point was that whatever could have been done, it wasn't. As I said, the government absolutely could have pursued other far fundamentally better concepts at the end of Apollo. Or it could have done commercial way earlier, getting out of the launch business entirely and working to switch over to a competitive private market 30-40 years earlier. What actually happened is that without the focus and level of discipline provided by a big ambitious goal and national spirit as a guiding star, more typical political incentives crept in and rapidly distorted the space program. Which resulted in enormous waste and stagnation as well as killing a lot of incredible people for no reason.
But regardless of how it happened, again the point is that it wasn't the scientific and tech environment that created a small window of a few years where inevitably practical economic mass launch designs would come about. It still took the right vision and right spark.
So yea, definitely a prudent investment. But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing. And even more billions wasted on SLS too.
No, the initial NASA contract was for cargo delivery via the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which dated to 2006. CRS and CC came significantly afterwards. Momentum did build but it was in fits and starts. It's a pretty fascinating bit of history in turns of twists and turns on both the political and technical sides, I highly recommend taking a look at the book Liftoff if you're at all curious. Like, even if it was selfish motivations it's worth noting that Commercial Crew probably would not have happened in 2010 without the support of Boeing itself.
>But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing.
Eh, I wouldn't fully agree with this sentiment honestly. The future we've arrived at was definitely not clear when the contracts were signed, and shit happens. If you're really serious about developing a new capability and place a few fully independent investment bets and some pay off handsomely while others are a bust, I wouldn't call it a waste because if you just couldn't know which would work and which wouldn't. That's just how it works. It's worth noting here too that Boeing has lost enormous amounts of money on its failures with Starliner. NASA has held them to the fixed price aspect of the contract. I suppose an argument could be made that NASA was more generous with milestone payments then they might have been, but at the same time that ultimately was Boeing shooting itself in the foot and NASA giving them rope because getting some money earlier didn't change the total pot at all. So if Boeing rushed, well that came back to bite them very hard.
>And even more billions wasted on SLS too.
That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.
Sure, that’s true. But my point is that those initial investments were a subsidy. They weren’t buying a product that already existed, they were paying someone to develop a product so that they could buy the product once it existed. It definitely paid off, even counting the money spent on Starliner.
> That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.
Agreed. I am just saying that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. At this point we’d be better off cancelling SLS and doing our next moon mission by launching smaller craft into Earth orbit on Falcon Heavy and docking them together. Like Apollo but with several launches spread out over a week instead of a single giant rocket. We could even assemble a cycler that way.
Sure we do, just watch For All Mankind :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)
Currently, almost half of NASAs budget is spent on manned space flight.