Comment by tsimionescu

20 hours ago

Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.

Decreasing price of a launch by multiple orders of magnitude and increased cadence is also an achievement that hasn't been achieved previously.

  • Increased launch cadence is an operational achievement, not an engineering one.

    And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9 as it was for a Soyuz to bring an astronaut to the ISS, at least.

That's a 60billion government program I guess to match the program you need to match that as well, starship is doing what it's doing at a tenth of a cost so far.