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A comment on SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year. Parent comment

Re:SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond ... by astrodust on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @12:28AM (#13751497)
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.

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Re:SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond ... by adrianN on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @01:42AM (#13751788)
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.
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Re:SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond ... by astrodust on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @04:48PM (#13758319)
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.

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Re:SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond ... by grkvlt on Tuesday February 28, 2017 @05:13AM (#13752652)
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.
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