> It was well argued by alt.space community, the kinds of XCOR, Beal Aerospace, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites etc. that it's not the case.
They had a hypothesis. It was untested and, by any reasonable definition of common expert knowledge, a far bet.
Saying this list’s existence disproves SpaceX’s technological work is arguing home brewers as evidence that Apple did nothing groundbreaking. Or Alberto Santos-Dumont as evidence the Wright Brothers were just incremental inventors.
Yes, they weren’t the only ones on the bleeding edge. But they were right there on it, and doing the lion’s share of the pushing of it.
> better equipped than many, though not all
SpaceX is miles ahead of all of them. Literally, hundreds of thousands of miles of flight time ahead. Ahead in vehicle manufacturing. Number of engineers working on number of problem domains. Hell, out of your list, only Scaled Composites still builds anything.
If we say SpaceX does no science, we must argue that the Japanese and Indian space programs do no science. Which nobody claims because it’s baseless. Designing new motors and engines and control systems and crew capsules and space suits and ultrasonic reëntry systems requires new science, technology and production expertise.
We can say Newton had a hypothesis regarding Earth artificial satellite, which took centuries to experimentally observe. But regarding powered descent, Delta Cliper flew years ago by the time SpaceX Grasshopper tests, and Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge showed that again. The untested part was to actually land the stage of an orbital rocket - difference in usage, not principal technology. Wouldn't say it was a far bet.
> But they were right there on it, and doing the lion’s share of the pushing of it.
They were practically alone in the commercial space, but technologically their achievements, I think, more incremental that Wright Brothers.
I'm not saying SpaceX did nothing worthy mentioning. It's the case, IMO, of staying on the shoulders of giants when other commercial giants became to lazy to look forward - indeed, the status quo was rather beneficial to Boeing-Lockheed, while Musk was interested in more long range projects. But Musk wasn't operating in vacuum by a long shot. Andrew Beal could probably reach similar results in a slightly different scenario.
> SpaceX is miles ahead of all of them.
"Better equipped" in this context is mostly "had almost a hundred millions to spare on first project development". That kind of money was't available to XCOR, Armadillo Aerospace, Masten Space - but probably was available to Beal Aerospace and certainly to Blue Origin (which is somewhat to the side of this list), maybe to Kistler Rocket... It's not about ideas and achievements, it's about starting conditions.
> Hell, out of your list, only Scaled Composites still builds anything.
It's almost two decades since founding of SpaceX, and this is capital-heavy area, surely only commercially successful survive. Blue Origin is practically only exception. Doesn't tell about technological advantage.
> If we say SpaceX does no science, we must argue that the Japanese and Indian space programs do no science.
SpaceX does applied science, targeted towards rather immediate applications in commercial systems, be that Raptor of Starlink. Here at least we can agree that a degree of science work is required for projects of that kind.
And saying this is about money and resources, and not focus and management, ignores the fact that SpaceX spent less than ULA and Blue Origin to develop 2 rocket engines, 3 rockets, three different recovery systems, and 2 different capsules. Blue Origin has been spending $1 billion a year of Jeff Bezos's money, and despite starting before SpaceX, still hasn't reached orbit or beaten the Falcon 1.
Rocket Lab's Electron made it to orbit with $210m of total funding, and they built their own engine with an electric pump. Far smaller than many other companies.
The reason why SpaceX is so successful is because Elon Musk isn't in it a vanity project, or to make money taking a slice of the LEO sat launch market. He has a vision, call it lunacy, of getting huge numbers of people to Mars. Working backwards from that goal, informs everything they do, which is why they won't settle for an incremental improvement on what ULA or Arianne is doing.
It's like saying if you gave equal money in 2001-2006 to someone to build better mobile phones, they would have produced an iPhone, because most of the components were there. I worked in the mobile market at that point, and I can tell you most people were chasing Blackberry, or imagining slightly better versions of say, an Nokia Communicator 9000, iPAQPhone, or OQO. The iPhone took a vision, and someone willing to tell the naysayers and corner cutters that he doesn't care about their objections, this is what they're doing.
For TEN YEARS on USENET, I read sci.space as people like Henry Spencer and other luminaries decried reusability. They rightly said that anything wings, or landing legs, or extra strengthening and margin you add to have repeated flights comes out of your payload. The major consensus of the time would be to tell Musk his ideas won't work and the physics say disposable rockets are the most efficient.
But marginal cost matters more than Isp or payload fraction, and if you have a system where the majority of your costs are amortized over many launches, lower payload is less relevent, you just do more launches.
Ultimately, SpaceX will prove the naysayers wrong, as surely as he proved the establishment and ULA's allies wrong.
They had a hypothesis. It was untested and, by any reasonable definition of common expert knowledge, a far bet.
Saying this list’s existence disproves SpaceX’s technological work is arguing home brewers as evidence that Apple did nothing groundbreaking. Or Alberto Santos-Dumont as evidence the Wright Brothers were just incremental inventors.
Yes, they weren’t the only ones on the bleeding edge. But they were right there on it, and doing the lion’s share of the pushing of it.
> better equipped than many, though not all
SpaceX is miles ahead of all of them. Literally, hundreds of thousands of miles of flight time ahead. Ahead in vehicle manufacturing. Number of engineers working on number of problem domains. Hell, out of your list, only Scaled Composites still builds anything.
If we say SpaceX does no science, we must argue that the Japanese and Indian space programs do no science. Which nobody claims because it’s baseless. Designing new motors and engines and control systems and crew capsules and space suits and ultrasonic reëntry systems requires new science, technology and production expertise.