"[T]he Apollo program was a major effort by the most powerful nation in the world. Falcon/Dragon is happening because a young genius decided to become a Heinlein hero, and so started a rocket-ship company. It's sad that most people have not yet realized it but the most interesting story in the world is unfolding right now."
> Falcon/Dragon is happening because a young genius decided to become a Heinlein hero, and so started a rocket-ship company.
Also, because it's happening 54 years after NASA was setup.
The kind of reading you linked to is disingenuous in the extreme and this kind of stuff seems common in SpaceX fans. Falcon/Dragon comparable to Apollo 11? No, not even remotely, Apollo 11 was the first event of its kind, SpaceX is currently attempting something which has been repeatedly achieved for the last 50 years, something which is almost routine for many nations nowadays: putting payloads in low orbit.
I don't want to put SpaceX down, what they're doing is great and opens the door for cheaper and simpler commercial exploitation of low-orbit, but comparing it to Apollo 11 is infuriatingly off-base and insane. And it's an insult to all of those who came before SpaceX, all of those who've worked in space agencies the world over (and especially NASA).
Most of the SpaceX fans I've seen aren't raving about SpaceX's technology (which, you rightly point out is a direct descendant of NASA). What they are raving about is SpaceX's economic model.
Because their model isn't based strictly on government contracting. It is based on minimizing costs to build a self-sustaining, privately operated space program. Contractors give you the space shuttle: it doesn't matter how expensive it is if it's what was in the RFP.
It's the difference between the government contracting out the F22 versus going to Boeing to buy a 737. And that difference is what makes it exciting.
Consider: if SpaceX's plans for fully reusable launch vehicles come to fruition then we may see a day where it is possible to launch the mass of a Nimitz class aircraft carrier plus 20,000 people into orbit every year for around the same cost as the Shuttle program.
Think on that a while. Think what it would mean even to only partially succeed at those goals, even by a wide margin.
Could you clarify the numbers here? I thought it would be interesting to compare this to the cost of constructing a Nimitz-class carrier here on earth, which seems to be around 5 billion USD.
Er, what needs clarifying? And why would you compare the cost of constructing an aircraft carrier to the cost of launching its equivalent mass? He wasn't speaking of any particular property of a Nimitz carrier other than its mass, and the cost of constructing military and civilian vehicles is not comparable.
The exact costs. I was wondering how much it will hypothetically cost to launch that mass to orbit, in order to compare that number to the cost of the complexity of an aircraft carrier.
It's not really a useful comparison, I know, just thought I might get a kick out of it.
Right now (2012 launch price) it would cost about $500 billion to launch the equivalent mass with Falcon 9s. They expect to cut the current cost in half, and with a very high launch rate Musk has said it could be 1/10th, but the required launch rate may not be achievable.
The entire shuttle program cost around $200 billion in 2010 dollars.
In fact, SpaceX has a technical debt to Apollo which they've been quick to acknowledge --- pointing out, for instance, that the Merlin engine injector design uses techniques pioneered on the Apollo LEM descent engine.
What's odd here is the failure to point out what SpaceX is doing differently --- engineering not for optimal performance, but for price/performance. (Using the same basic engine design on both Falcon 9 stages, for instance, and designing the tankage so that common tooling can be used for both stages. I'm sure there are more decisions along these lines that they haven't made public.)
"[T]he Apollo program was a major effort by the most powerful nation in the world. Falcon/Dragon is happening because a young genius decided to become a Heinlein hero, and so started a rocket-ship company. It's sad that most people have not yet realized it but the most interesting story in the world is unfolding right now."