I totally understand where you’re coming from and I mirror the sentiment, 100%. I’m tired billionaires steering the country, and I’m especially tired of musk, I hope I never have to hear his name in the news ever again.
That said, I think your take is misguided. For all that I hate musk, spaceX has achieved some truly astonishing things. And not only have they achieved their goals, but they’ve done it at an unprecedented rate and at a shockingly low cost. SpaceX is developing technology at a similar rate to NASA way back at the beginning, during the Gemini and Apollo programs, except back then NASA was getting 4% of the federal budget. SpaceX has not had anything close to that level of funding. In fact, though they have most definitely taken government contacts, for the most part, they’ve been able to foot the bill themselves (and with investors) for the majority of their development costs. When you compare costs and outcomes directly - what spaceX delivered vs what it cost us against any other launch provider, the difference is astonishing.
But that’s all business stuff. What spaceX has done that impresses me is the technical stuff. They developed a relatively inexpensive rocket engine with a 184/1 thrust to weight ratio. That’s the best thrust to weight ever achieved by an orbital class engine, like by a lot. Before that, I believe the record was held by the F-1 engine that powered the Saturn-V and took us to the moon, it boasted a 94/1 ratio.
For their next major rocket engine spaceX developed the raptor, a full flow staged combustion engine, running on methane. Explaining why “full flow staged combustion” is impressive is probably outside the scope of this comment, but please believe me, this is a huge technical achievement and it provides some very real benefits. And running on methane is a good choice for reusability, it burns cleaner, and there’s potential for producing it off earth.
And of course most importantly they changed the industry by landing rockets. That’s not a small feat, some of their competitors called them foolish for wasting time even trying, the industry was very much not moving in the direction of reusability. Now that SpaceX has proven the viability and in fact the huge advantage of reusable rockets, there are many rockets being designed for this, from Rocket Lab, Arianespace, Stoke Space, Blue Origin, Relativity Space, eXpace (a hilariously named Chinese company), and probably many more; this is now the way the industry is going, that’s a big deal.
I totally understand where you’re coming from and I mirror the sentiment, 100%. I’m tired billionaires steering the country, and I’m especially tired of musk, I hope I never have to hear his name in the news ever again.
That said, I think your take is misguided. For all that I hate musk, spaceX has achieved some truly astonishing things. And not only have they achieved their goals, but they’ve done it at an unprecedented rate and at a shockingly low cost. SpaceX is developing technology at a similar rate to NASA way back at the beginning, during the Gemini and Apollo programs, except back then NASA was getting 4% of the federal budget. SpaceX has not had anything close to that level of funding. In fact, though they have most definitely taken government contacts, for the most part, they’ve been able to foot the bill themselves (and with investors) for the majority of their development costs. When you compare costs and outcomes directly - what spaceX delivered vs what it cost us against any other launch provider, the difference is astonishing.
But that’s all business stuff. What spaceX has done that impresses me is the technical stuff. They developed a relatively inexpensive rocket engine with a 184/1 thrust to weight ratio. That’s the best thrust to weight ever achieved by an orbital class engine, like by a lot. Before that, I believe the record was held by the F-1 engine that powered the Saturn-V and took us to the moon, it boasted a 94/1 ratio.
For their next major rocket engine spaceX developed the raptor, a full flow staged combustion engine, running on methane. Explaining why “full flow staged combustion” is impressive is probably outside the scope of this comment, but please believe me, this is a huge technical achievement and it provides some very real benefits. And running on methane is a good choice for reusability, it burns cleaner, and there’s potential for producing it off earth.
And of course most importantly they changed the industry by landing rockets. That’s not a small feat, some of their competitors called them foolish for wasting time even trying, the industry was very much not moving in the direction of reusability. Now that SpaceX has proven the viability and in fact the huge advantage of reusable rockets, there are many rockets being designed for this, from Rocket Lab, Arianespace, Stoke Space, Blue Origin, Relativity Space, eXpace (a hilariously named Chinese company), and probably many more; this is now the way the industry is going, that’s a big deal.