Just to add a bit of clarification: When Mueller was making rocket engines in his garage, he wasn't some random nobody. He was definitely the most accomplished and successful rocket engine designer outside Russia, and could make real claims about being the best still working engine designer on the planet.

The reason he was tinkering on small engines in his garage instead of designing big engines for his employer, TRW, was that after designing the best American first stage engines (the TR-106 and TR-107), it became clear that it didn't matter that his engines were better, for political reasons it was impossible to kill the RS-25 program (also known as SSME, or Space Shuttle Main Engine), and therefore any future vehicle would use them instead, despite them being strictly worse for any use other than for the Space Shuttle. This was immensely demoralizing to him, and he was considering just quitting the industry and doing rockets as his hobby. Then Musk managed to convince him to work at SpaceX, for a much lower wage (and stock options, but the rational early valuation for rocket company stock is $0), mostly on the promise that at SpaceX, his engines would actually fly.

The NASA program of record heavy lifter, SLS, is still using the designed-in-70's RS-25 now, 25 years later, and plans to toss 4 of the $40M engines into the ocean on every flight. SpaceX is what happens when you build rockets with actually modern technology, instead of all the components NASA is forced to use because some senator needed to maintain employment in his home district.

Not only is the RS-25 old, but it's several times more expensive per unit thrust than the Saturn V's engines. That was worthwhile for the Shuttle because they reused the engines. Naturally, NASA and its cost-plus contractors decided the RS-25 was the perfect engine for a disposable rocket.

> NASA and its cost-plus contractors decided the RS-25 was the perfect engine for a disposable rocket

NASA did no such thing. They were ordered to use the engine by the Senate.

(When the Constellation program was canceled and the SLS program was created, Senate ordered NASA to pick solutions that "minimize contract cancellation costs". Not minimize total costs, minimize costs related to cancelling contracts. This of course means that the contractors you are already using can offer any solution they want, at any price they want, and so long as they are willing to waive the contract cancellation penalties as part of their package, you have to pick that solution.

They all offered a really expensive, really bad deal. I know several NASA engineers who quit in disgust because of this.)

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that but it's not surprising.

The path taken in the 1950s for spaceflight was dictated by its funding source -- missile development. Missiles were optimized for high performance and were single use devices.

Even when dedicated non-military rockets began to appear, e.g. the Ariane range and the Space Shuttle, they had dependencies on legacy infrastructure that was originally designed for strategic weapons (i.e. it was intended to work at peak performance, just once). The payloads evolved to reflect the launch system constraints, so very expensive, one-of-a-kind comsats and earth resources satellites, each of them a bespoke design (or at most one of a dozen or so).

SpaceX isn't building missiles; it's optimizing for reliability and cost (which means reusability). More like airliners than missiles. This doesn't mean low performance (the efficiency and power density of a modern civil airliner turbofan would have been a jaw-dropper to 1940s military aviation engineers) but it does mean the performance goals are different.

I am still extremely skeptical that Heavy/Starship will facilitate a Mars colony ... but that's because I'm skeptical about the economics and practicalities of building an off-planet colony when the externalities we normally take for granted (like a compatible biosphere) aren't available and nobody's really done the necessary R&D work on self-contained biospheres -- even the ISS is effectively an open-loop system dependent on constant resupply. (Biology and ecology are much harder than they look to a naive outsider.)

Riffing off of your comment:

Neal Stephenson has a pretty good article about path dependence in space exploration: https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s...

I have the same doubts. I think it'll inevitably happen, eventually, but the timeline may be wayyy longer than people seem to think.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a small settlement for research or something in my lifetime. Maybe something like what we have in Antarctica.

We really, really need a second run at Biosphere 2, only this time integrating what the failures of the first run taught us. (Only 25 years ago, with no serious follow-up!)

The next step would then be something like a Bigelow B330 module in LEO, which is close enough to get the astronauts home from in a hurry if something goes badly wrong.

(These steps can be commenced with current tech: Heavy/Starship not required.)

Step 3 would be a bigger test hab out beyond the Van Allen belts, preferably a couple of habs revolving around a hub to provide centrifugal "gravity" at Lunar or Martian levels. Goal is to test systems for use on planetary surfaces exposed to cosmic/solar radiation (because outside our atmosphere). Starship is probably mandatory for this phase, because it's a lot more massive and a lot further away. Alternatively: conduct this experiment on the Lunar surface, once astronaut return capability is available (but why waste expensive reaction mass if you can simulate a gravity well?)

Without a lot of R&D work under these conditions, a closed-circuit life support system for Mars is a huge safety risk for the astronauts who set it up (and who are too far away to rush home in a hurry if it goes badly).

And without closed-loop life support, a Mars "colony" is no more a colony than an Antarctic research station reliant on resupply for everything except air and water.

What went right, the way Elon, explained, was that they are a private company that isn't set up to profit from long term government counteracts. For them, it's sink or swim. So they swim. He explained that others are set up to take a long time because they never want the contracts to run out, to keep getting money.

Also his system strategy is : the best design to use is one that doesn't require the design in the first place. Ie get rid of many systems. Keep it simple. Less can go wrong, and the schedule is reduced. "Tight is right. Long is wrong". He did a great talk last month.

You guys might like a video I'm releasing on Halloween, "the actual, physical, reason why time slows at the speed of light". My channel is "TheRainHarvester". Stay tuned...

There's a popular saying "rocket science is not rocket science". There could be other people, instead of Mueller or Shotwell, which could do similarly well. SpaceX is just a first company which succeeded - not that nobody's tried; at some point that was bound to happen.

It's almost like there's an insanely talented genius at the top making consistently great decisions!