zevets

Looking at the specs page, their claimed yield stress is 20% higher than aluminum compared to a factor of ~4x for traditional CF composites.

Also concerns about the fiber content may be misguided. The hard part of CF compoisites is the the layup process, which is what a 3D printer would do. The part can then be vacuum bagged to pull out the resin, as in traditional CF manufacturing techniques.

While it's hard to make a data driven argument in this field, I think the US government has been incredibly successful in picking winning new technological ideas, judged by my notion that the vast majority of the scientific and technical advances in the last 60 years have occurred here in the United States. The US government has long had a tradition of picking winners in science and technology, and I don't think the fact that we are also the leader in science and technology is simply coincidental to that.

Looking for counterexamples, ie technical advances that have occurred outside of the US due to lack of government support, the only one that comes to mind is the failures in green technology, but I think that small failures there are minor compared to the other successes.

I also think looking for scientific literacy in the executive positions of government is less relevant in the highly bureaucratic world of government funded research, as there executives have less control on individual funding than they would in the private sector. As long as the the executives respect the technical expertise of their bureaucrats, (and the workforce is knowledgeable), then individual domain knowledge is less critical than it would be in the private sector.

This notion that people can't pick winners is, in my opinion quite inaccurate. The need for light weight electronics for aerospace systems, and the view that semiconductors were 'the answer' to this problem led to a massive amount of government funding (50% of all R&D funding) and support (the government was far and away the largest customer for semiconductor devices) almost directly led to the creation of the Silicon Valley we are all so proud of [1].

Second, the notion that prizes can solve this problem is simply unreasonable. If a major goal (ie a cure for cancer) takes 20 years to develop, no organization can pursue the goal without intermediate funding. In order to provide intermediate funding with some semblance of accountability, you essentially create the existing R&D structure that exists in America today.

The other advantage to government funding is that with proper open access protocols, innovative ideas aren't trapped in the organizations that created them. There's no doubt that companies like SpaceX could have achieved what they have without the backbone of research done by NASA and published in NASA's amazing technical report series.

1. A nice article on the history of government support for the transistor industry. http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~business/bhcweb/publications...

It's not that high. A lot of the losses in take-off aren't the consequence of drag. I think I saw on wikipedia that the aerodynamics losses are only 1-200 m/s of the delta-v budget.

Judging from the shape of the SpaceX capsule, it seems pretty like it has a limited maximum re-entry velocity, whereas orion is designed pretty explicity for a high speed re-entry.

I think when space-x says that dragon is capable of returning from the moon, they intend on using the capsule draco thrusters to enter the atmosphere as slowly as possible.

Orbital isn't building man rated vehicles.