Blue Origin conducts new test flight with suborbital New Shepard missile – IT Pro – News

The Space Shuttle was a disaster. It was an expensive thing that wasn’t worth it, considering how much more the US could have done with that budget for space travel. It was expensive to build (partly due to design, partly because of political reasons, each state had to make its own part for the Shuttle and thus logistically made construction very inefficient), and expensive to maintain (it had to be supposedly economic because it was a reusable vessel, but refurbishment was hugely expensive). Okay, it had a ton of volume. Which was very useful to be able to get Hubble into space (although that was probably also possible with several conventional rockets, and then assemble the telescope as segments in space). And it fired the imagination, which is also positive.

In the Von Braun time (btw I hate to call him a Nazi.Yes he built rockets for the Nazis, but I don’t understand how that relates to his performance for the Americans, in the era, the cold coolorg, where you talking about), they simply could not land missiles with pinpoint precision, and repeat that over and over with high reliability.

It is true that now ‘super’ computers are compact and light enough to install in rockets, with highly accurate sensors, and advanced software (it’s not just a matter of computing power), and much more efficient parts supply chains, that in a few years’ time, humanity will be able to launch far more cargo and people into space than Saturn V could. And that for less than 1% the price of the Saturn V.

The only reason there was so much progress in the Apollo era was because the US and the Russians were sprinting against each other. There were virtually infinite budgets to be able to reclaim boss over boss. Sprinting, like any athlete, only lasts for a certain amount of time until you start paying a price. No country can keep spending so much money in such a relatively short period of time indefinitely.

Speaking of the Nazis, that was also the reason why the Nazis developed so quickly. Well, partly talent in the right place at the right time, partly because of reforming Germany’s industries, but largely because of the huge budgets released by the NSDAP (which they could finance by building up huge debt, more money printing, cutting other budgets for the people, and stealing from other peoples and countries).

In other words: in times of war, there is always more innovation in the field of aviation and space travel. When people are afraid of dying, they always spend a lot more trying to prevent it. Let’s be happy that we are finally starting to see innovation again. Not at the pace like that under a state of war, but nobody wants to go back to WWII or the cold war.

The reason for the stagnation in space travel since the end of the cold war was part lack of technology, part politics, and part lack of ambition. Musk and Bezos have enough capital, ambition, and brains to reboot the aerospace industry at the right time. It’s phenomenal how fast SpaceX is on its way to dominate the space industry. Not by making deals and excluding competition, as happens with more politically affiliated aerospace organizations, but simply by offering rock-solid value. They don’t even use patents to thwart competition (because in Musk’s words “governments don’t care much about patents [dus het heeft geen zin om ze aan te vragen], and with patents you have to make workings public. “) The only real competitors that SpaceX will have in the long run will be Blue Origin and the Chinese government.

The CCP is the last government in the world with an almost infinite wallet (although the CCP is very good at hiding the national debt). Russia also had reasonable pockets of money, but the country has been doing badly economically in recent years, and the Russian government spent too long on old rockets and did not take reusable rockets seriously (now they have the ambition to not have the first reusable rockets until ~ 2026). missile). The EU will compete in some segments when we have reusable missiles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gANSR-Cme9Y, which almost seem like copies of the Falcon 9), but we don’t have the budgets as yet like China to make up for our inefficiencies to compete against the hyper efficiency of SpaceX and Blue Origin.

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