I’m kinda confused… I see the Space X test launch approaching and I’m just mind blown.
We went to the moon in 1969 ya? Why is it so difficult to re enact that? Why is SpaceX doing it and not NASA? I’ve seen/heard of a few unsuccessful test runs but I’m not super up to date with our space journeys. But don’t we have this technology/engineering capability?
I don’t mean to be arrogant but can someone explain it to me?
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The idea here is to make access to space massively cheaper, in this case to make colonising Mars affordable. The vehicles are designed to be fully reusable and to be cheaply mass-produced. Each rocket will launch many times so confidence can build up that it’s working well and reliably. In contrast, the Saturn V moon rocket was built in small numbers and everything had to be checked to be sure it was perfect before its first launch, making it very, very expensive. Then it was thrown away after that one launch.
NASA seems to have become conservative over the decades and was burned by its experience trying to build the Space Shuttle that was also supposed to be cheap by being reusable. SpaceX saw a different approach but couldn’t convince NASA or others and had to develop the technology themselves. A key strategy has been to take risks and learn by testing often, with frequent failures driving very fast development. NASA has grown to view testing failures as public relations disasters so they design everything to be perfect the first time. This makes for very conservative designs and extremely slow progress. SpaceX will change direction and redesign often but NASA will cling to old, dubious choices, often for political rather than engineering reasons.
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