It's not unreasonable to suggest that most of specifically rocket and spacefaring technology SpaceX uses now was introduced by someone else. Their main achievement is reusability and adjacent technical solutions.
The grandparent comment was pointing out that it cost NASA 200bn, and spaceX 15bn.
The parent comment pointed out that spaceX are actually saving money because they already got what nasa spent 200bn on.
My comment pointed out that they aren't just saving money by using NASAs tech, but tech from the Soviet Union as well - suggesting that their savings are far beyond just 200bn R&D
Not sure about parent poster, but to be fair NASA built on German WWII rocket/missile development, and Canadian know how after the collapse of Avro Canada.
How many billions was that?
This sort of "they're just building on" talk is weird to me, and not really relevant.
What SpaceX has accomplished is astonishing, and no belittling of their accomplishments should be tolerated.
Because in NASAs case it was "the stuff that came before" + 200b (or whatever the fantasy figure truly is).
Its unfair to say spaceX did what NASA did on a smaller budget (which is what the comment that kicked off this thread implied) because they DIDNT do what NASA did, and instead got "the stuff that came before" + "the stuff that NASA spent 200b on" + "the stuff from other sources that also cost billions" + the 15b that they actually spent to get where they are.
How can you disagree with that? You may think this discussion is silly - but its DIRECTLY as a response to someone implying that spaceX are achieving what NASA did with less money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44316227
> This sort of "they're just building on" talk is weird to me, and not really relevant.
Not really. You're not talking about technology. You're debating the economics behind it. You're seeing naive fanboys praising SpaceX's costs for the likes of Starship by comparing them to the cost of the SaturnV project, arriving at the simplistic conclusion that Starship is cheaper. This is like comparing your cheap Android phone as being far cheaper than a 1950s UNIVAC. And when the silliness of this specious reasoning is called out, your reaction is to downplay it as "not really relevant"?
That said, you're upset that I said comparing costs isn't relevant? Isn't that the case you're making right now, that the costs cannot be compared, therefore aren't relevant in this discussion?
My tact on non-relevance, is that saying "it was built on another program's tech!" is not relevant, because everything meets that criterion. For example, as I said, the Saturn was built on decades of German research, including war time research during WWII, into rockets. Saturn's US development costs were a fraction of overall rocket research done by the Germans!
So if upthread is going to argue "but it's all built on the Saturn, and free knowledge!", then the same argument can be carried further back, thus negating this argument. Why?
Thats the whole point for this entire thread. Pointing out that you CANT compare the costs of spaceX with NASA because spaceX is building on NASAs (and others) achievements.
Maybe you need to go back and reread this entire thread rather than suggesting others do so.
Well there are many reasons as to why - i just gave a single example. I don't see why you don't think prior knowledge has any value, but I guess you are entitled to your opinion.
I never even hinted that prior knowledge has no value. Not once.
Instead, I said it is an impossible thing to compare, for everything is built upon another. In fact, everything is built upon a myriad of other things.
Really, both the Heavy and the Saturn cost about the same. That's because they both depend upon the entire sum of human knowledge and research, to be built.
A billion trillion trillion trillion in today's dollars of knowledge gained and experience honed, over millions of years. So what if one cost a billion trillion trillion trillion, and another cost a billion trillion trillion trillion + a few billion more. The difference is meaningless, and not even worth considering.
And then there's the whole "how much is new" argument, and there's new knowledge aplenty thanks to SpaceX.
I really don't get these arguments. People seem to really love to denigrate the effort, the excellent results. It's beyond bizarre. And worse, mock because test flights, expected to possibly go sideways, do?
So weird.
"Hi, I'm going to see if this will work. It'll probably explode. But if it does, I'll learn something"
How far back is the "start" of history in this telling, and (more importantly) why?