As impressive as the space efforts in the 60s and 70s were, I've often thought that they were a false start created by a war-like impetus to show off. Tech-wise, we really weren't ready for a space age. The sort of control systems that make this sort of outcome possible haven't been around for all that long, really, especially if you mark them from being economical and not just "it technically existed in a lab somewhere". Plus if you really dig into how these rockets are built and maintained, you see a lot of other technologies that have not been around for that many decades, like, practical and reliable 3D printing, and computing simulations that have more computational power per second than the entire computing world could scrape together in a year in the 1960s, and those are just the highlights, not the exhaustive list.
A lot of people are like "we got to the moon in the 1960s, where's the progress we should have had since then?" but I see the 1960s as the bizarre exception rather than the thing that should be used to set the rule. There was no way the space age was going to happen then, in an era where you're almost sitting there counting each bit of RAM you can afford to send into space. The true Space Age is just dawning now, and it's still early in the dawn; we still have to have massive international cooperation to put a single space station up, we can't do something as basic as refuel in orbit, we just barely started having people in space for commercial rather than governmental reasons... it's just the beginning.
I think it's not so much that we weren't ready for a space age tech-wise, but that the the reason we have so much of our technology today is because of investments made in the 1960s. NASA had basically unlimited money to throw at every technical challenge in the way of landing a human on the moon.
The apollo program drove the need for more computational power, more memory, better guidance and navigation and control systems, better materials, experiments to better understand many phenomena, etc. And after the apollo program ended, the contractors that developed those technologies on NASA contracts could just commercialize them. And the data from experiments, on materials, aerodynamics, combustion, and so on, that is publicly available has made engineering so much cheaper and easier.
I think the 60’s showed how much humans can achieve in terms of innovating with very little (in terms of tech). Now, we’re seeing how much can be achieved with a whole lot more. And, I agree, the space age really does feel like it’s only just heating up. Very exciting time!
> There was no way the space age was going to happen then, in an era where you're almost sitting there counting each bit of RAM you can afford to send into space.
And yet, they got to space. Better computers are not the solution to every problem. And it wasn't a false start. We are already in a space age, we have been for quite a while. It didn't stop at Apollo. We have satellites for the military, TV, weather, various forms of communication, navigation (GPS...), telescopes, space stations, probes and rovers. We do science, commercial and government operations. Starlink is great, but it is just the continuity of all the space communication abilities we developed over the years.
I think computers are not what will enable the "true space age". Sure, they help, and SpaceX, if successful with their Starship will certainly be a big advance, but I think that we are missing a key ingredient to reach the "true space age" and it is nuclear power. Starship maybe could get us a settlement on Mars with hundreds if not thousands of launches and refueling missions. Project Orion was to launch an entire colony in one go, return trip included. Even Saturn was considered feasible. Project Orion is mad, but it goes to show how limiting chemical rockets are compared to nuclear.
And it is something we probably could have done already, without modern computers and 3D printing, if we wanted to. It is maybe a good thing that we didn't though. Spreading radioactive material in the atmosphere and mass producing thermonuclear bombs is kind of scary.
A lot of people are like "we got to the moon in the 1960s, where's the progress we should have had since then?" but I see the 1960s as the bizarre exception rather than the thing that should be used to set the rule. There was no way the space age was going to happen then, in an era where you're almost sitting there counting each bit of RAM you can afford to send into space. The true Space Age is just dawning now, and it's still early in the dawn; we still have to have massive international cooperation to put a single space station up, we can't do something as basic as refuel in orbit, we just barely started having people in space for commercial rather than governmental reasons... it's just the beginning.