From the Atlantic:
Today, SpaceX regularly flies astronauts into orbit on a transportation system it designed from start to finish, and is the only private company to have earned that responsibility. But the Dragon capsule doing that work is a cozy, gumdrop-shaped container, not a giant spaceship, and can carry seven people at a time, not the 100 passengers Musk imagines boarding Starship someday. If successful, Starship would be unlike any other space vehicle in history, especially on its return to Earth. America’s now-retired fleet of space shuttles landed on runways like planes, Russian Soyuz capsules parachute down to the desert, and SpaceX’s Dragon capsules splash down in open water, but Musk envisions Starship landing vertically, as upright as it stood before liftoff. It is an enormous technical challenge.
Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that the actual engineers at SpaceX are doing impressive work and making major advances, but not challenging in the sense that no one has done it before. Real rocket scientists are quick to point out that the same underlying technology put us on the moon over fifty years ago.
Nor has it been dormant in the meantime.
Of course, the Delta Clipper was far more primitive than the starship, but it also flew a quarter century ago and was built for a fraction of the budget, even adjusting for inflation. Taking this and other projects into account, SpaceX's advances clearly represent real progress, but not radical breakthroughs. Theirs is an evolutionary, not revolutionary approach, particularly compared technologies like air-breathing rockets and other single-stage-to-orbit systems which, if they pan out, will completely disrupt air and space travel. Musk's company has been as conservative from a technological standpoint as it has been bold from a business standpoint.
There's nothing wrong with that -- it may turn out to be the best approach -- but it is almost the complete opposite of the story the press has converge on.
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