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I& #39;ve had a lengthy discussion today about the SpaceX mission. I& #39;m observing the following - people act like this is some kind of breakthrough, at the scale almost of the Apollo program. Now I don& #39;t want to demean the effort, space is hard, but the reality as I see it is:
We are sending a capsule on top of a rocket to LEO. This has been done thousands of times by various space programs, and was done regularly in the US in the 60& #39;s. Aside from some external sugar such as LCD screens, this technology hasn& #39;t fundamentally changed since then.
In many ways the space shuttle was a much more impressive vehicle. Much larger, capable of randevouz missions (remember the Hubble telescope service missions?), in principle mostly reusable - remember SS only destroyed the big fuel tank. In theory ALL of the engines -most $$ part
were recovered. Even today SpaceX can& #39;t recover the upper stage engine. Now we all know SS eventually turned out to be a failure because the reusability was good only on paper. But I& #39;d caution everybody - we still don& #39;t know if SpaceX reusability is any better economically.
So as much as I& #39;m space enthusiast, I& #39;d advise some humility about this launch. The US space program is really in a bad place right now IMHO and yes, in all that political crap and bureaucratic immobility, the SpaceX looks like a star. Especially compared to Boeing.
But in a larger perspective it really is not that impressive, in fact in many ways a huge downgrade from the Space Shuttle (which was developed in 70& #39;s and perhaps using modern tech could be made much better as well).
