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Re:NASA: We're sending humans to Mars by krschultz on Tuesday December 02, 2014 @04:48PM (#8690169)
SpaceX is better at putting a pound of stuff in LEO than Nasa per dollar by a massive margin. But that's all they do right now.

I want NASA to build payloads and the private sector to build rockets. But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

Re:NASA: We're sending humans to Mars by seanflyon on Tuesday December 02, 2014 @05:27PM (#8690438)
> But that's all they do right now.

Well that and launch to GEO and design and build human spacecraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_V2) and are closer to cost effective re-usable rockets than anyone ever has been.

> But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.

I don't recall saying that rockets are more important than payloads, but neither one does much good without the other. I'm not even sure where you are drawing the line between payload and rocket. Is the rocket that takes people to Mars a payload, or the rocket that lands on Mars, or the rocket that leaves Mars?

I am excited about SpaceX because they are dramatically reducing the cost of space exploration and industry. This makes everything NASA wants to do cheaper and more likely to actually happen.