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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2011-12-12 11:00 am
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Interesting Links for 12-12-2011

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[identity profile] cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com 2011-12-12 12:03 pm (UTC)(link)
I remember recently thinking that for all the talk of "space-age technology" we used to have, now it might have been most apt to describe the space age as in the past. SpaceX fills me with at least a little optimism that some people are still trying.

I'm interested in the description of it as a successful public-private partnership. That definitely seems to be the case: probably no-one would have gone to space if the United States and Russian governments hadn't gone it first, and created a vast body of experience. But conversely, NASA was getting moribund, and having someone drive the creation of new rockets designed somewhat practically seems (judgement pending) to have been necessary.

But the necessary prerequisites seem to be (a) one man with a vision (b) a lot of people with extensive experience happy to get onboard (c) from somewhere, ridiculous amounts of funding. (Are people investing in SpaceX because they think it's commercially viable, they expected to recoup there profits some way other than success of the company, or because the amount of money isn't actually that much for investors and it's worth gambling, or because they think it's cool and _might_ work and want to support it?) I'm not sure if this is a vindication of our current system of "government funds pie-in-the-sky research, later free enterprise takes over when it starts to be viable" or is a "it worked despite the current mess of a system, what would work better?"
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[personal profile] andrewducker 2011-12-12 12:12 pm (UTC)(link)
Have an awesome article on SpaceX that goes into some of the detail behind this:
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Visionary-Launchers-Employees.html

(Posted a couple of weeks ago, but very good)

I do think that getting the human race into space in the first place was such a big job that it required governments, and SpaceX is using a lot of the things learned during that original exploration. But everything I read about the shuttle tells me that it was a bad decision to make it the way we did.
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