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Comment by throwaway-1209 | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX is doing more or less the things that have already been done 50 years ago by truly the best minds of that generation, except they're cheaper and run as a private enterprise. They're standing way up there on the shoulders of those giants, and we should recognize that.

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Making things cheap is just as important as inventing things. Nobody would care about computers if they still cost $10m and took up a whole room.

Well, most folk here still would. Point valid, nonetheless.

We're not talking that kind of price differential. A factor of 5x at most, with worse specific impulse than the Russian engines from the 90s. I get it, Elon is the second coming of Steve Jobs for many, and it is admirable that he's pursuing the fields that are hard, but he's not the second coming of Sergey Korolyov or Werner Von Braun, or even the countless others who made the space age possible.

Yet nobody else had landed and reused the first stage of a rocket. They are doing truly novel things.

Didn't NASA do that in 1996?

If I understand correctly, the Space Shuttle's SRBs were recovered, refurbished, and reused starting in 1982?

Yes, though they didn't make controlled landings, they used parachutes.

Yes, all those rockets landing their first stages back in the 60's, that was quite boring and old. Oh, wait, they didn't do that at all.

> They're standing way up there on the shoulders of those giants, and we should recognize that.

We do. And they do too.

But they are innovating, and bringing down the cost of putting stuff in orbit is very important progress, no point in belittling that.

It wasn't because it was impossible. Shit, those guys landed on the Moon and Venus with nothing but slide rules. It was because government is not spending its own money, so it can afford five times the cost.

Landing on the moon is a bit different than landing here on earth.

If you wanted to say that SpaceX had done 'nothing new' then you're about a year late to the party, they are definitely innovating.

Simpsons... I mean NASA did it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

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