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Comment by WalterBright

19 days ago

> Musk has built orbital rockets.

Musk has built lots of cheap orbital rockets. That changes everything.

> That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims?

See the other responses in this thread.

8 comments

WalterBright

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mmooss  18 days ago

> lots of cheap orbital rockets

It's valuable for sure. It's nothing like, "The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds". There are many others, and many are doing more (again, NASA, etc.). JPL's homepage says "Our missions have flown to every planet and the Sun ...", and that they've been on Mars for four years, so let's be serious and not throw wild absurd claims at the wall (very Musk-like, though!).

  • WalterBright  18 days ago

    > There are many others

    Now that Musk led the way, sure. People laughed at Musk when he started out.

    > NASA

    Has sent a handful of probes out, only a handful because they are so costly. Now NASA can send out legions of them. There was a previous discussion here about why only one JWST was made and launched, at a cost of $10B. We all hope and pray it doesn't break down. Now with Musk's rockets we can launch lots of them and make N times the discoveries!

    (With cheap launches, we don't have to make single machines that must be super reliable. We can make cheap machines at fractions of the cost, and so what if a few of them fail.)

    Lowering costs by an order of magnitude changes everything.

    • mmooss  18 days ago

      NASA's work has been reduced to a "handful"? What is the point of writing that? And there is far more to cost of missions and their hardware than launching them. How much of JWST's cost was the launch?

      1 reply →

direwolf20  18 days ago

It changes the price and speed of satellite internet. Apart from that...?

  • WalterBright  18 days ago

    There were cars before the Model T, but only for the rich. Ford made cars affordable for everyman. That changed everything.

    There were books before Gutenberg, but only for the rich. His printing press made them cheap enough to print newspapers. That changed everything.

    Before Bessemer, making steel was extremely expensive and rarely one. With the Bessemer Process, vast quantities of steel could be cheaply made. That changed everything. Google says:

    "The process revolutionized the industry by reducing costs and increasing production, making steel accessible for major infrastructure projects in the 19th and early 20th centuries."