It’s less that people are putting faith in Elon (sure, some fanatics might be), but it’s that everyone else is somehow even worse.
SpaceX is actually getting stuff to space, despite their prototypes blowing up. Hell, even if this Starship thing is a complete failure and never works, their existing rocket, the Falcon, is still far beyond any of the competition.
The SLS: $10 Billion and a decade late to develop a ship that recycles old Space shuttle parts, then costs $2-3 Billion per launch, and maybe can only launch one every 2 years.
ULA Vulcan: currently years late, still finding problems, and even after all that gets worked out, it can maybe do 6 launches a year?
SpaceX: 1-2 launches per week.
That’s not faith, that’s just facts. I would absolutely love to have somebody else step up and take SpaceX’s crown, but… there really isn’t anybody. Bezos’s Blue Origin may have the biggest chance, but they are more likely to act like ULA than SpaceX.
Let my try and distill that. SpaceX is capable of doing some good work, when Elon leaves them alone.
Remember, Starship is Elon’s napkin drawing idea of making a big cheap steel tube. Bigger and bader than everyone else! For a mission that doesn’t exist, which it’s not even designed properly for. Starship is 100% Elon’s blunder and he’s made so many insane promises for it that it’s dragging SpaceX down.
Falcon 9 has launched over 500 mission with a very high success rate. Of course the bulk of advancement should be coming from NASA and we need to spend more there, but SpaceX is putting up big numbers in successful payload lifts.
NASA has always been dependent on commercial for profit entities as contractors. The Space Shuttle was developed by Rockwell International (which was later acquired by Boeing). The Apollo Program relied heavily on Boeing, Douglas Aircraft (which later merged into McDonnell Douglas, and then merged with Boeing), and North American Aviation (which later became Rockwell and was acquired by Boeing), and IBM. Lots of cutting edge stuff in that era happened from government contracts throwing money at private corporations.
That’s the whole military industrial complex Eisenhower was talking about.
The only difference with today is that space companies have other customers to choose from, not just NASA (or the Air Force/Space Force).
NASA ran the projects. They have specifications to contractors for manufacturing. That’s a far cry from farming out the entire process and renting space on a commercial rocket.
NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It’s still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.
If Starship wasn’t constantly exploding you might have a point. Seems as though that the reality is that they’re all pretty much at the same spot but Elon wants to pretend that they aren’t.
People really put the faith of the entire American space program on Elon. It would be funny if it wasn’t so stupid.
It’s less that people are putting faith in Elon (sure, some fanatics might be), but it’s that everyone else is somehow even worse.
SpaceX is actually getting stuff to space, despite their prototypes blowing up. Hell, even if this Starship thing is a complete failure and never works, their existing rocket, the Falcon, is still far beyond any of the competition.
The SLS: $10 Billion and a decade late to develop a ship that recycles old Space shuttle parts, then costs $2-3 Billion per launch, and maybe can only launch one every 2 years.
ULA Vulcan: currently years late, still finding problems, and even after all that gets worked out, it can maybe do 6 launches a year?
SpaceX: 1-2 launches per week.
That’s not faith, that’s just facts. I would absolutely love to have somebody else step up and take SpaceX’s crown, but… there really isn’t anybody. Bezos’s Blue Origin may have the biggest chance, but they are more likely to act like ULA than SpaceX.
Let my try and distill that. SpaceX is capable of doing some good work, when Elon leaves them alone.
Remember, Starship is Elon’s napkin drawing idea of making a big cheap steel tube. Bigger and bader than everyone else! For a mission that doesn’t exist, which it’s not even designed properly for. Starship is 100% Elon’s blunder and he’s made so many insane promises for it that it’s dragging SpaceX down.
Starship is SpaceX’s Cybertruck.
Bezos seems pretty happy with space tourism he doesn’t wanna work for the government. Gotta kinda be sick to want to in the first place.
Falcon 9 has launched over 500 mission with a very high success rate. Of course the bulk of advancement should be coming from NASA and we need to spend more there, but SpaceX is putting up big numbers in successful payload lifts.
Boeing and someone else are trying too. Way behind Space X. So no, not “entire space program”…
Fuck all commercial dependency. Fully fund NASA, and let them like what they did back in the 60s, which no company could have done.
Stop relying on corporations to lead our space programs. It’s too important to leave to grifters and corner cutters.
NASA has always been dependent on commercial for profit entities as contractors. The Space Shuttle was developed by Rockwell International (which was later acquired by Boeing). The Apollo Program relied heavily on Boeing, Douglas Aircraft (which later merged into McDonnell Douglas, and then merged with Boeing), and North American Aviation (which later became Rockwell and was acquired by Boeing), and IBM. Lots of cutting edge stuff in that era happened from government contracts throwing money at private corporations.
That’s the whole military industrial complex Eisenhower was talking about.
The only difference with today is that space companies have other customers to choose from, not just NASA (or the Air Force/Space Force).
NASA ran the projects. They have specifications to contractors for manufacturing. That’s a far cry from farming out the entire process and renting space on a commercial rocket.
NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It’s still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.
But ultimately it’s still just contracting.
Really interesting— I don’t follow this nearly enough, so thanks
If Starship wasn’t constantly exploding you might have a point. Seems as though that the reality is that they’re all pretty much at the same spot but Elon wants to pretend that they aren’t.