Check out the comments over at my National Review piece. It’s almost as though some of the commenters are going out of their way to prove my thesis, by engaging in exactly the ignorant, straw-man behavior that opponents of the new policy have been for going on three years now. I love the notion that because I correct misstatements of fact, I am “attacking” the commenter. I especially love the latest insane redefinition of “subsidy” — that because SpaceX didn’t reinvent every single wheel in its vehicles, instead building on technology developed over the past decades, that it has been “subsidized” by NASA for decades.
8 thoughts on “Irony Challenged On Space Commentary”
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He didn’t build that. B.O.
Rearden didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people.
For some, Atlas Shrugged is merely a how-to primer.
This is the typical crap I see posted today. Since the manufacturing infrastructure is moving elsewhere and there is a lot of profit from rent seeking behavior by licensing “IP” the doers are considered to be worthless offshorable morons and the suers are the super smart heroes of the US. The same thing happened in the UK before as “boffins” are considered to be a blundering useless waste of money and resources.
If we took this to the extreme everyone should be paying someone because their great-grandfather invented whatever. It could be the steam engine or radio or alternators, etc. Instead of working towards the future with the resources of the present people are hobbled with the constraints of the past. The end result will be stagnation.
SpaceX picked up a team of doers and started building a rocket that would enable them to reduce the cost of space launch by an order of magnitude by applying best practices and ideas that worked well in the past sure. However the end result is something that did not exist before. I still remember Elon talking about how he considered the Thor rocket as one of their inspirations (TEL operations) or that they got the idea to use the pintle injector from work done at TRW. They use friction stir welding and Al Li structures. SpaceX is not working on a vacuum. However I also remember a lot of people claiming that a rocket with 9 first stage engines could never fly safely yet they have flown it successfully for 3 times in a row without a hitch. Their structures are also much lighter than the supposedly industry leading isogrid construction method used in EELV. You should remember that next time someone jokes that they are Gemini redux.
NASA was not working on a vacuum either. We could discuss here how Tsiolkovsky, a self educated man, argued that LOX/Hydrogen could be used as rocket propellants or how Goddard did the first successful liquid fueled rocket launch. A lot of the work done on reentry shapes is based on prior work done with artillery shells.
Brought to you by the same ignorance that calls DoD contracts with Boeing a “subsidy”.
SpaceX can stand on the shoulders of literally generations of expensive Cost Plus developments.
Good. Grief. That thing (literally) burns my eyes. It’s OK (or not OK) to stand on NASA’s shoulders, but it’s REALLY OK (or not OK) to use past work that was developed at cost-plus??
… or … only EXPENSIVE cost-plus??
One could (literally) get a migrane from that.
I understand the Merlin is a further development of one of the engines NASA was working on in the 90’s, but then gave up on.
So they may be technically correct, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect well on NASA that SpaceX has built a working relatively cheap launcher out of a rocket engine NASA threw away.
SpaceX is using a channel wall nozzle in Merlin-1D. Are they simply copying Russian rocket engines? No.
So, by the same logic, Rotary Rocket was a NASA effort.
I think they use wheels to get the Falcon 9 to the launch pad.
They didn’t invent those.