Cheeky Devlin wrote:It's quite damning that it's taken this long to reach this point. Private companies shouldn't have to be the ones who are taking up the slack left behind by NASA who've spent decades pottering about in the back yard rather than pushing things to their next step. Admittedly that's most likely due to funding, but they should have been developing and driving down the cost of this stuff long ago.
Finally good to see some progress being made though. Exciting times.
Nasa has suffered from funding cuts as well as constant changing of its focus. Their heyday was undoubtedly the 60s and 70s, when they had one goal, put people on the moon, it doesnt matter what it costs, get it done. Since then different administrations have slashed budgets and their focus has been moved from exploring deeper space, going to the moon again, focus on space stations, going to Mars, replacing the shuttle etc etc. SpaceX do incredible work and its because they are a singularly focused company, Musk has Mars in his sights and everything they have done has been with that goal in mind, Falcon heavy is very impressive but it is built on their existing work and it is just the next step in getting to Mars. Nasa is hamstrung by the fact that Space is seen as "sexy" by a lot of Americans so politicians wont give it more funding, its a terrible shame as the people who work there are probably incredibly passionate about what they do, the red tape just strawberry floats things up for them.