Except today it will be done at less than 1/10th the cost. So yeah, progress.

If it will be done. Musk isn't great at the "deliver" part, not to mention how dangerous this mission is.

Musk sends partially re-usable rockets into space for a few years now. A decade ago, all he had were some fancy powerpoint slides.

We sure have different definitions of "delivering".

We're still not 100% that they're reusable in a meaningful way that actually reduces costs. The landings are awesome but if it costs too much to reuse them it's more a stunt than anything because as good as it is to not just chunk that hunk of metal in the ocean every launch if it's cheaper that's how it'll be done.

It's a lot easier to go from a stage that lands to one that has to be ditched than the opposite. Worst case, Musk has the same tech that the rest of the world does, although to me it's clear he has quite an advantage.

Oh yeah and personally I think that it's going to work but it hasn't been actually shown that it's cheaper and that the rockets can safely be reused. And that really won't be well shown until multiple reused rockets have been launched.

An interesting outcome is that SpaceX has been able to analyze the rockets post-landing so that they can learn more about the stresses on the rocket during launch. Of course they have to in order to re-launch the rockets, but this is already a capability that no other space agency has had. This ability could end up paying for itself if it means they can feed the knowledge of the rocket back into the design and launch of a new rocket.

Actually, we're pretty sure (based on what SpaceX has announced) that the engines can be reused, and they're a reasonable % of the booster cost.

He's pretty good at the "deliver" part, where he has trouble is "on time."

Space is dangerous. That comes with the territory. I would be very surprised if this ended up being more dangerous than Apollo 8 just given the advances in materials and electronics.

Hurray for reproducability - we can still do what was last done in 1972 - this is something which eludes most scientists!

Look at F1 in 1972 and F1 in 2017 for an example of what relentless, continuous improvement looks like. Can you imagine what would be like if they'd given up on the series? If all that we had was NASCAR and Indy? The entire automotive industry would be over a decade behind, if not more. Most thigns people take for granted like ABS and traction control might not even exist.

Look at SpaceX as an example of what happens when someone fumbles the ball so hard it takes over four decades to recover it. Virtually nothing happened in that time other than the shuttle program, and that was never intended for travel outside of Earth orbit.

Now we're finally back to innovating and engineering for actual space travel.

We did send plenty of robot missions that wouldn't have been possible in the seventies and produced very valuable science. Rosetta and Curiosity for example are very cool missions.

Consider these very cool missions are about 1/10th of the number of missions America was in a position to do.

Consider an America with the Texas Collider operational where major discoveries were made a decade before the CERN one even existed.

Consider an America where the ARPA internet project could have been one of the least notable breakthroughs in the last thirty years.

It's actually a good analogy. The F1 Cars (equals Apollo CSM vs. Crew Dragon 2) have much improved since the 70s, but the Tracks haven't changed and Silverstone is still Silverstone (and the Moon is still where we expect it should be) so the mission parameters are much the same too; you go round and round seventy-odd times (or, once) and come home.

For a fraction of the cost.

Being the first to land on the moon was never intended to be cheap. So many things had to be invented simply to get there.

Just imagine how economical space flight would be if all of that 1960s technology had been incrementally improved on for efficiency, manufacturing ease, and scale instead of a lot of it being almost literallly mothballed.

There was never any reason to spend that kind of money. It was worth going to the moon once to see what was there, but I have yet to see anybody articulate a reason to go back that doesn't rely on soaring rhetoric and implausible money-making schemes.

Rare-earth mineral security?

Rare-earth minerals aren't actually rare. The name comes from the relatively low concentrations in which you find them naturally. But we won't run out; they're just more expensive to refine as we tap lower concentration sources. Even poor sources are going to yeild minerals at a cost that's a few orders of magnitude less than a what you'd get on the moon.

Rare-earth means low concentrations. There is still a lot of this stuff in the darts crust an it's not destroyed with use.

Yeah, why did they build computers so big and expensive and slow in the WWII? They could have waited for a Skylake Intel, and it would be not only better, but also cheaper...