> Yet it would be 23 years before someone came around again.
Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
IMO, even more important than funding is that NASA rockets are now designed by Congressional committee. It’s hard to innovate when you’re pressured into reusing Shuttle components to keep the money flowing to specific contractors.
We certainly do know that while the Apollo program was still in progress NASA was developing the nuclear rockets that would make Mars missions feasible. Think weeks of travel time instead of months, and much larger payload fractions. If you want to talk about funding cuts, talk about Nixon. The Commercial Crew program came decades later after the failure of the Shuttle program, when it was revealed just how dangerous the they were.
It was reaveled how dangerous it was around 1986, after the Challenger disater. There were too many incentives to ignore it.
Commercial crew would probably not come to be (at least not in its current form) if SpaceX wasn't around to prove that it's possible
Space in the US has always been extremely political. SpaceX is a more recent kind of politicisation which happens to be palatable to the current neoliberal orthodoxy, which follows the usual cycle of "break something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is."
If it had been left to the engineers in 1970s NASA and not to anti-science Republican cranks and crooks like Nixon and Proxmire, we would absolutely would have had a moon base and Mars landings long before now.
There is a vast gulf of time between the 1970s and SpaceX. The space shuttle alone, fully NASA-run, was a (beautiful-looking) failure long before SpaceX came along. And it was fully government-designed and government-run. It was also astonishingly expensive.
Good things can happen in the private sector or the public sector. SpaceX is a good thing happening in the private sector. No one's brain has to go running to Republican-bashing and history compression to counterbalance that to avoid thinking new thoughts.
The space shuttle had government specified requirements (a single vehicle to do everything including capturing soviet satellites and ferrying people into orbit)
It had to do everything because the business case for it (that it would have sufficient ROI) required it. Even then, the business case was basically fraudulent, and the reality was even worse than the critics like Mondale were saying.
No engineer that works for SpaceX, with SpaceX, or is closely connected to engineers who work for SpaceX would agree with your assessment that SpaceX's success is due to:
> "break[ing] something the government runs by defunding it and interfering in its management, privatise it, then crow about how inefficient big government is."
It is possible that this will occur going forward now that Elon is a de facto government official, though. Also, the engineers in 1970s NASA are what created the Space Shuttle.
I have no idea why you think NASA would have gotten to the moon starting in the 70's. Every single dollar was being spent flying the Shuttle and setting up the ISS during the 80s-2010's.
>Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.
Uh, SpaceX didn't come into being until 2002. And the Space Shuttle was not in any way cheap, nor a pile of things we did with it. Nor did the US Government in any way subsidize SpaceX, anymore then it "subsidizes" paper manufacturers by... ordering paper for its printers. It contracted with SpaceX for commercial services at a fixed price, and has saved billions and billions of dollars as a result. You seem a touch confused on timelines here.
And my entire point was that whatever could have been done, it wasn't. As I said, the government absolutely could have pursued other far fundamentally better concepts at the end of Apollo. Or it could have done commercial way earlier, getting out of the launch business entirely and working to switch over to a competitive private market 30-40 years earlier. What actually happened is that without the focus and level of discipline provided by a big ambitious goal and national spirit as a guiding star, more typical political incentives crept in and rapidly distorted the space program. Which resulted in enormous waste and stagnation as well as killing a lot of incredible people for no reason.
But regardless of how it happened, again the point is that it wasn't the scientific and tech environment that created a small window of a few years where inevitably practical economic mass launch designs would come about. It still took the right vision and right spark.
Technically NASA contracted with SpaceX (and several other companies as well, such as Boeing) to develop crew–rated versions of their rockets. That was explicitly a development contract where NASA paid a couple of billion up front to entice those companies to develop a crewed craft capable of visiting the ISS. Later they bought rides to and from the ISS from SpaceX and Boeing. SpaceX used that money and some of their own to go from the Falcon 1 to the Falcon 9. Since then NASA has bought flights on Falcon 9 rockets for launching satellites and space probes in addition to crewed flights to the ISS.
So yea, definitely a prudent investment. But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing. And even more billions wasted on SLS too.
>Technically NASA contracted with SpaceX (and several other companies as well, such as Boeing) to develop crew–rated versions of their rockets
No, the initial NASA contract was for cargo delivery via the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which dated to 2006. CRS and CC came significantly afterwards. Momentum did build but it was in fits and starts. It's a pretty fascinating bit of history in turns of twists and turns on both the political and technical sides, I highly recommend taking a look at the book Liftoff if you're at all curious. Like, even if it was selfish motivations it's worth noting that Commercial Crew probably would not have happened in 2010 without the support of Boeing itself.
>But also some subsidies in there, and a few billion wasted on Boeing.
Eh, I wouldn't fully agree with this sentiment honestly. The future we've arrived at was definitely not clear when the contracts were signed, and shit happens. If you're really serious about developing a new capability and place a few fully independent investment bets and some pay off handsomely while others are a bust, I wouldn't call it a waste because if you just couldn't know which would work and which wouldn't. That's just how it works. It's worth noting here too that Boeing has lost enormous amounts of money on its failures with Starliner. NASA has held them to the fixed price aspect of the contract. I suppose an argument could be made that NASA was more generous with milestone payments then they might have been, but at the same time that ultimately was Boeing shooting itself in the foot and NASA giving them rope because getting some money earlier didn't change the total pot at all. So if Boeing rushed, well that came back to bite them very hard.
>And even more billions wasted on SLS too.
That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.
> If you're really serious about developing a new capability and place a few fully independent investment bets and some pay off handsomely while others are a bust, I wouldn't call it a waste because if you just couldn't know which would work and which wouldn't.
Sure, that’s true. But my point is that those initial investments were a subsidy. They weren’t buying a product that already existed, they were paying someone to develop a product so that they could buy the product once it existed. It definitely paid off, even counting the money spent on Starliner.
> That's pure old space pork and a totally separate discussion beyond being another example of how decades can flow by on garbage.
Agreed. I am just saying that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. At this point we’d be better off cancelling SLS and doing our next moon mission by launching smaller craft into Earth orbit on Falcon Heavy and docking them together. Like Apollo but with several launches spread out over a week instead of a single giant rocket. We could even assemble a cycler that way.
A more interesting question is what could have happened if NASA had used much more of its funding on practical research (including rocketry research), instead of wasting a huge amount of it on sending people up into space for no good reason over the past 50 years.
Currently, almost half of NASAs budget is spent on manned space flight.
Problem here is that we don't know what could have happened if USGOV had properly funded NASA and the sciences instead of cutting it back to the bone and then subsidising SpaceX.