Cars, planes, and rockets all have optimal shapes for their environment, of course they're not going to change much once they get to that point.
Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at least) performance, efficiency, and safety.
Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much as they can out of the old fleet.[0]
SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship.
I was watching the Boardwalk Empire not so long ago. When the main character was a boy, people were wearing fancy clothes, sending letters, and riding horses. As a grown man, he talked on the phone and flew a plane. Whereas my parents were flying planes when they were young. I fly almost the same planes(yes, more safe and efficient) and it takes the same time to get from A to B.
Now you can contact almost anyone on earth using a pocket size computer and even see them, and share with them a very large portion of humanity’s knowledge.
I know that's the meme, but I think it's false and a dangerous thing to tell ourselves.
Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
And that's just the things that are publicly documented at all. There's libraries worth of implicit industrial knowledge too, including material that is explicitly proprietary. How does Intel or AMD design a modern computer chip? How does Rolls Royce design a jet engine? How do you fabricate a mono-crystalline solar cell? How do you mine for raw materials?
This is "I, Pencil" writ large. I would estimate only the smallest fraction of humanity's knowledge can be found on the internet - well under a percent, at least if you don't count "emailing an expert". If we had to rebuild society on the basis of what we could find on the internet, we'd be lucky to reach 20th century technology levels.
> Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
If you include pirating sites? Close to 100%, most books are scanned into pdf's and can be found free online. So only thing stopping this is legal and not technological.
> > Walk into any university library, pull a random book off the shelf, and flip to a random page. What are the odds that the information on that page can be found in a google search?
General Aviation was destroyed for many reasons, none of which were really technology or innovation problems. Commercial General Aviation was decimated by NIMBAs, Commercial Airline pressure, massive population growths, expensive to insure/maintain/own and to be honest, a lack of care of passion from aviation for the past few generations.
But.. the homebuilt and sport space has innovated quite a bit - glass cockpits, auto pilots, efficient engines, electric power plants, micro jets, composite aircraft..
I think appropriate comparison would be, what would equivalent travel cost, in money an time, to the parents of your parents.
The argument is not that nothing is getting better, but that the rate of improvement has slowed. So the frequently touted 'exponential progress' is a myth.
And you could make the same case for other inventions.
Hammers in 1860 looked like hammers. In 1880? Same thing. In 1900? Same old hammers. 1920? 2020? Yep you guessed it, still a hammer.
Some things are invented and then perfected to a point where you can't really improve them much in a cost effective way. That doesn't mean that new stuff isn't being discovered and worked on at the same or faster rate.
"SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship."
From 1940s, in 20 years we invented jet planes and rockets, and since then for the next 60 years we are fiddling with the same basic rocket design. Are you seriously pretending that taking 3 generation to learn to land them is as big of an achievement?
If we kept up the pace of progress, we would have skyhooks in service,
nuclear thermal rockers, nuclear electric propultion, fission fragment rocket and dozens of others.
We have arguably regressed, as starship will just take us to where we were before, being able to reach the moon.
Starship is designed for mars. They built a new space craft that will be re-usable, at a cost efficiency never seen before that uses technology specially designed because of Mars. It's engines will use Methane - something no other manufacturer was able to master because of specific issues with those styles of engines and they did it in with the purpose of generating methane on mars to be able to fly back. The methane can be synthesized on mars from CO2 in atmosphere and Hydrogen in Ice. They had to invent the largest re-usable rocket platform, the first re-usable and working methane engine and the first flight computer that could take off and land...
Not only that, but they invented or invested in massive technology for manufacturing all of this such that the engines are often 3d printed and designed with precision only dreamed of before.
"First flight computer that could tiake off and land"
Soviet Buran could do that in the 80's
"Starship is designed for mars"
Original starship design was 5x larger and could take meaningfull payload to Mars. It had to be scaled down so that it use the ancient Saturn 5 launchpad and other infrastructure and be more affordable. Current starship is in the same weightlifting category as saturn 5.
"First engines to use Methane"
So what? If it was first one to use Uranium, that would be a revolution. This is just burning a different propellant. Its an incremental step. It is not a 60 -year milestone. Its like saying 'i upgrading home boiler from coal to oil' - so what? You are still stuck will low energy fossil fuels
Landing a winged aircraft is different than landing a rocket.
Starship is designed for mars and its design changes pending mission realities. The fact they're progressing so quick is awesome.
First engines to use Methane are great - and it shows a mission profile that is correct for a trip to mars - since they can use science to generate fuel while on mars.
Uranium wouldn't be a revolution and there is no way it would ever pass certification for leaving earth orbit beyond small decay batteries that have been used for 60+ years.
Just because you don't agree with the cool shit going on, doesn't mean it isn't cool.
And if it could have been done 60 years ago, it would have been done 60 years ago.
No, not a "fan" of spacex, i'm a fan of space in general. my passion is cosmology, where were discovering more about black holes and gravity waves and new kinds of stars and getting closer and closer to possibly figuring out what all the dark matter and dark energy is.
But hey, two can play this game, you seem to hate SpaceX so you throw out the sciences and engineering too..
There are multiple space companies sending up tourists now and dropping the cost per kilo of space travel down while creating new tech to do it. Sure, it may look like a rocket is a rocket, but its certainly not the same rockets from the 1960s - these are rockets that can take off, launch multiple payloads and have components return to earth and land from where they started.
Absolutely not! I love SpaceX and the all-composite Dreamliner, but the benchmark is not 'pretty good', the benchmark being discussed is 'exponentially better than anything that came before', otherwise we don't have 'exponential progress' - perhaps we have linear progress, or quadratic, or asymptotic.
I think they are not in the same league as Wernher von Braun or the Wright Brothers - those folks changed the world as we know it,
- when Braun was designing rockets, we didnt even know that human body can function in space at all. There were no engines to look at for examples. There was nothing.
Turns out we dedicate tons of resources to advanced technology when we are at war (WW2/cold war). Sounds like we need another good war with a power who is actually a threat to rapidly innovate.
Cars are still vastly different today than in the 80s in (at least) performance, efficiency, and safety.
Planes are also getting quite a bit better, although adoption of these planes is slow as most airlines want to get as much as they can out of the old fleet.[0]
SpaceX has been landing their rockets for several years now, and are about to take an even bigger step with Starship.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lapFQl6RezA