The government gave $18B to the SLS and so far has vapor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
The government spent $211B on the shuttle program and got 133 launches. SpaceX will probably surpass that number this year at a fraction of the cost.
NASA's record on rockets since Apollo has been abysmal.
I don't think government is necessarily bad (the Russians did a much better job in recent decades!) but it leans into its failures and often has bad incentives. SpaceX fails fast, has great incentives, and has achieved an incredible amount on a (comparatively) shoestring budget.
I think we can all agree on those points. The point of the GP that I (and I think many others) react to is the "Only in America things like this can happen" part. I just don't get American exceptionalism I guess.
Saying that something "could only happen in America" (usually) indicates a view that America is somehow unique (as in the American exceptionalist view).
I'm not saying that America hasn't done great things, or that Americans shouldn't believe they have done great things. It's just that no country is unique in this manner, and Americans seem to often say they are in ways that I rarely see other countries do.
Having had a bit of a ground-level view of this going back over a decade, yes, America is exceptional in this respect. Lots of people tried to do private launch overseas. Trivial barriers like explosives licenses stopped most at the gate. The sole success stories are in the U.K. (Skyline) and New Zealand (Rocket Lab), with the former stretching the definition of "success." Meanwhile, America has SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and a trove of others.
The permissiveness and commercial latitude the U.S. government affords Americans is unique. The protections American law and culture afford private property is similarly quite extreme. These facets come with downsides. But in 2001, I can confidently say that had Elon started SpaceX anywhere but in America, it would have dismally failed.
Yes, SpaceX could only happen in the United States. But let't not pretend that the whole American package warrants the 'favored and exceptional nation' badge that so many seem to want to bestow on it, which is what this American exceptionalism is all about. Shining city on the hill and more of that kind of crap.
One cannot ignore that they did their later work here. Not there. As did many others whose own societies collapsed or otherwise failed them.
In any case, I’m arguing a narrow argument: that a company like SpaceX could only have been founded, when it was founded, in America. Because of its certain characteristics that are an exception in the set of the world’s cultures. (One among many: its unique ability to assimilate and positively appropriate from immigrants.) That doesn’t mean it’s faultless; that’s a straw man.
The US is not unique in that regard. Australia and New Zealand are very comparable in that way. Canada probably belongs in that list too.
I agree that, in the contemporary world, SpaceX could only have happened in the US. But that's because of economic factors (government funding for the space industry, easy and plentiful access to venture capital, a low regulation business environment.) That particular combination of economic factors is unique to the US. Being exceptionally welcoming to immigrants is rare but not unique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
In a more just world they would have stood trial in Nuremberg.
But occasionally I think it has some justification. And I think SpaceX is one of those rare cases. I just can't see a firm like SpaceX existing in any other country. The US offers a unique combination of easy access to capital, relatively low regulation, and high government funding for private space ventures, which I doubt you will find anywhere else.
Yes. And none of those things are historically unique.
They just happen to be true now in the US, partly because the US is the large economy in the world. But those things were true during different times in history in other countries.
Do you think it was a coïncidence that the Industrial Revolution kicked off in the UK, when they just happened to be one of the larger economies in the world at that time? Where did all the early research in electricity happened, in the US? Do you think Volta, Ampère, or Hertz are American names? Or the concept of interchange able parts (see the book The Perfectionists by Winchester)? Where was the internal combustion engine invented? The American space program was kickstarted by a bunch Germans.
Of course culture helps as well. Britain actually lost its initial lead in the chemical industry, even though things started there:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauveine
Fiddling with industrial chemicals was poo-pooed by the British intelligentsia, so the industry in Germany ended up surpassing Britain (e.g., BASF). See the book Mauve by Simon Garfield for a pretty good history on this:
* https://www.simongarfield.com/books/mauve/
It may be that the US has the go-go culture now that other countries used to have.
What is happening now in the US is a great thing, but to call "unique" is an insult to countless historical figures IMHO.
I never said it was historically unique, if by that you mean without any historical parallel. Of course if you look at other industries and other historical periods, you will see other cases where a certain industry in a certain country has pulled ahead. And US leadership in space (or any other industry) is not guaranteed to last forever, and is in fact unlikely to last forever. But the US does provide a supportive environment for private space entrepreneurship which is unique in the world today.
The US has both some unique strengths and unique flaws. It is a world leader in both the space industry and in mass incarceration. The first is something it can be proud of, and the second is something of which it should be ashamed. Neither lead is guaranteed to be permanent, so in neither way is it unique in an absolute historical sense, but in both ways it is unique relative to the world of today.
> Do you think Volta, Ampère, or Hertz are American names?
I feel like you are arguing, not against anything I actually said, but things you are imagining I said. I'm not an American. I'm perfectly capable of being critical of the US (there is much I could say on that topic) but I also think it has its strengths and SpaceX is evidence of some of them.
You're siting 0.1% historical outcomes when you look across all of the active civilizations across all of human history.
The conditions in the US currently, and Pax Americana more generally, are extremely rare in the history.
[1] Joel Moker's Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. I'd also highly recommend Moker's "The Gifts of Athena"
Or geopolitical concerns.
The government (US taxpayers) were the ones that did the initial work to level the raw earth and pave the road. SpaceX may be doing amazing work improving the process, but comparing the two as you’re doing is not appropriate.
The multiple problems with Nauka suggest they've lost their edge and never learned the lessons from docking issues with Progress in the past.
SpaceX is/was just another entry on the long list of private contractors commissioned to build things for NASA, DoD, et al. But different here is that SpaceX worked at very very different speed than Aerojet Rocketdyne, ULA, and all the other old-space fossils. Still, those old contractors are valuable for other things — good welders, technicians, and engineers take many years to train and these old legacy corps provide a steady income stream to maintain a certain level of manufacturing readiness.
All created because the government wanted something done and was willing to cut a check:
I agree that the Space Shuttle had a cool factor that nothing else does.
The they didn't. What nonsense. They just keep flying the same old stuff as the quality gets worse and they don't do anything new.
It's not a coincidence, it's geography.
It is desirable for reconnaissance satellites to cover the entire planet regularly. That means high inclination orbits. That means southward launches (as opposed to eastward). That requires a launch site with ideally lots of ocean and not a lot of population to the south/southeast.
The US does plenty of military launches into other orbits from the east coast.
And the billions spent on the technologies that allow those engines to exist. SpaceX didn't invent rocket engines. It stands on the shoulders of many giants going back through Apollo to the early days. There are even traces of Soviet tech in the raptor (ie closed cycle). Nearly all of that work was funded by taxpayers ... and by whatever funded the soviet programs.
Building a better mousetrap is great, but that doesn't mean that all the previous mousetraps were not also great too.
Legitimate criticism of SpaceX fanboys is not "Pooping on the party". People who pretend that this is a ground-up space program, an icon of how private enterprise is always better at everything, need to be educated in the history of spaceflight. I myself could build a car in my garage that is better/faster/cheaper than everything available in decades past. That doesn't mean that I am one iota smarter, better organized or more innovative than the engineers who built those classic cars.
> better/faster/cheaper than everything
So do talking down SpaceX based on that makes no sense.
They kind of did invent full-flow engines though, which were an unattained holy grail of rocketry.
"Staged combustion (Замкнутая схема) was first proposed by Alexey Isaev in 1949. The first staged combustion engine was the S1.5400 (11D33) used in the Soviet planetary rocket, designed by Melnikov, a former assistant to Isaev.[1] About the same time (1959), Nikolai Kuznetsov began work on the closed cycle engine NK-9 for Korolev's orbital ICBM, GR-1. Kuznetsov later evolved that design into the NK-15 and NK-33 engines for the unsuccessful Lunar N1 rocket. The non-cryogenic N2O4/UDMH engine RD-253 using staged combustion was developed by Valentin Glushko circa 1963 for the Proton rocket."
And way down at the bottom of a long engine list spanning more than half a century...
"Raptor—SpaceX LCH4/LOX engine in development, first flown in 2019[19][20]"
(Yes, there are others listed, but SpaceX was first to actually fly something.)
That the IPD was hydrolox and didn't proceed to the point of a full engine, let alone a flight is besides the point.
What you said was: "They kind of did invent full-flow engines though", which is completely false.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
> SpaceX was first headquartered in a warehouse in El Segundo, California. By November 2005, the company had 160 employees.
> El Segundo is a city in Los Angeles County, California,
That's the only place you can launch a polar mission over ocean from the continental United States.
> A whole industry bootstrapping itself to make semi-conductors doubling every 18 months, going from exotic, mission critical hardware to commodity;
Silicon Valley did not bootstrap itself. It received untold billions of dollars from the US government during the Cold War (and lots of stuff happened during the WW2 economy, when the US was the Allies' armorer). Do you think it a coïncidence that most spy satellites are launched from Vandenberg? Or that Skunk Works, located in California, developed so many secret aircraft?
Do a search for "The secret history of Silicon Valley":
* https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
> SpaceX is doing the same thing with flight hardware.
Notwithstanding the millions that NASA gave them in their early stages.
* https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/news/COTS_selection.html
The list of spinoff technologies just from NASA is impressive:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
The fact that the US was, post-WW2, the largest economy in the world, and the main developed nation that didn't see mass destruction, certainly didn't hurt.
The fact that the US government throws a lot of money around certainly helps private industry:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State
This also does not diminish the entrepreneurs that, once the baton is handed to them, charge forward. My main argument is that there's not as much "bootstrapping" as many people believe.