Comment by jve

They are inventing a little, but the basics of rocket flight are now well understood. You can get a university (probably post grad) course on it. And nothing that they are doing is all that revolutionary, definitely not compared to what Apollo did (going from airplanes and ballistic missiles to orbital space flight and then Moon missions).

Consider that even reusable self-landings boosters were being worked on in the 90s, before funding was cut off. And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight, launching some kind of payload to orbit.

Apollo program was a major achievement, probably the largest in the history of humanity as of yet. But SpaceX definitely should get a credit for "breaking things", or for running agile dev cycle with hardware ("hardware heavy"). Let's just strap engines to a fuel tank and try to fly it. Let's just build a body by welding steel plates together and see what happens. Let's just launch this thing to 20 miles and see if we can make it aerobrake and land it with the engines. Iterate by learning and constantly improving. Nobody done it at that scale as of yet.

(Which of course is only possible if you have the Founding Father with a few billion $$ just laying around)

This seems like a fairly disingenuous comment.

SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before.

Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero progress on reusable rockets, cheap super heavy lift capacity to orbit, and America had no way of taking their own astronauts to the space station!

Musk (hate him or love him) founded a company from nothing which has exceeded the capabilities of nasa and the us government, the European space agency, and the russian space agency, as well as ULA, Boeing, Lockheed etc.

They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused. They have the most cost effective rocket ever made for taking loads to orbit. They have reused rockets up to 20 times! They have build the most powerful rocket ever built which is fully reusable. They have built the most efficient and powerful rocket engines ever built before. And they have done it all incredibly quickly starting from nothing.

Oh and they also built a massive internet constellation providing fast and cheap satellite internet to the whole world, saving countless lives and also helping stimulate economies across the world as well as enabling more remote work etc.

So much of what they have done was considered impossible or not economical or not practical or so difficult other countries or companies didn’t even TRY.

So yes. Given their success it’s worth trying to understand their development methodology, which is iterate fast and fail lots and learn lots. Given how much they’ve kicked the shit out of the SLS program in capability and budget and also how they’ve crushed Blue Origin (which started earlier with more budget) who both operate in a more old fashioned way, I would certainly say it’s important to acknowledge they may be doing something right!

> But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??

NASA lost a good number of probes in the process of getting the expertise to do that.

And likely quite a few test devices in building out the skycrane.

SpaceX is a boon to NASA. NASA does great work but as they are a government entity they move at a slower pace.

SpaceX getting credit for innovating in their own way doesn't mean NASA doesn't get credit for all the great things it has done.