Comment by efuquen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by efuquen | Hacker News Reader

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I guarantee you if China or India were to make strides towards a serious Mars mission (i.e. they had a Moon landing) we would have another space race with the US involved. It's exactly what happened when the USSR sparked the first space race. Whether we would win, who knows, but there is still plenty of expertise and know how in about sending humans into space in the US ...

I really don't understand all the absolute trust in SpaceX, in terms of human exploration they have proved nothing thus far. Sending cargo to the ISS is a different thing than sending humans. Once they pull that off we can start talking about great strides they are making in human space exploration.

Otherwise it's still a risky venture that hasn't proven anything yet, the only reason to have so much faith in them is because you're over zealously infatuated with Elon Musk. Not to downplay any of his obvious success, but I still believe in seeing results in the same way you're waiting to see if NASA is going to do some "serious things". Let's hold people to same standards, shall we?

> I really don't understand all the absolute trust in SpaceX, in terms of human exploration they have proved nothing thus far. Sending cargo to the ISS is a different thing than sending humans. Once they pull that off we can start talking about great strides they are making in human space exploration.

I think the thing about SpaceX is it seems like they have no ulterior motives (no one honestly thought it was going to make money, until it did), and they seem to have some chance of success.

I also think your humans to the space station mark is entirely the wrong one, they could do that today if they were willing to accept a bit more risk, and will almost certainly be able to do it in the near future. But putting humans in space isn't solving any of the hard problems. Far more interesting will be if they manage to re-use a rocket (or even first-stage) with no or minor refurbishment... as re-use is the only way they will be able to achieve their goals (paraphrasing massively from what Elon has said on numerous occasions).

I guarantee you that people felt quite certain that SpaceX was going to at least have the possibility of making loads of money. No one invests capital or starts a business, much less an aerospace business, if they don't honestly believe it will make money. Even if you have a bunch of idealists who want to see humanity achieve it's destiny and reach for the stars, they would be fools to invest so much time and money in something that they believe was destined to fail.

Whatever Elon Musk is, he's not a complete fool.

> Whether we would win, who knows

I like to think of "we" as humanity. Hence we would win, no matter which flag gets there first.

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