…from Henry Spencer. With some Mercury history, for the NASA worshipers.
5 thoughts on “More Dragon Commentary”
The comparison to Mercury is hardly an apples to apples match up however. The engineers working on Mercury were doing something that had not been done before, SpaceX has the advantage of learning from their mistakes and 50 years of technological advancement in every applicable field. Comparing SpaceX accomplishments to NASA’s modern day lack thereof is a better and more telling story.
I agree. Comparing SpaceX’s success with Dragon compared to what NASA did with Mercury 50 years ago is like comparing their success with the Falcon 9 this year to the teething pains and failures of big rockets back in the 1960 timeframe. A lot of painful, expensive lessons were learned back then and all companies benefit from that knowledge. In the meantime, every NASA directed shuttle replacement of the past 30 years has failed.
Dragon vs. Mercury is not meant to be an apples-to-apples comparison, it’s just an anecdote describing how even NASA in its prime was far from perfect.
Obviously, there are more recent examples from today (such as comparing Falcon 9 to Ares 1-X, one a clean-sheet booster design that’s gone from idea to delivering payloads on orbit in a fairly short amount of time and for incredibly little money, the other a derivative launcher heavily based on existing systems which has only seen one extremely limited test launch of a fraction of the actual hardware of the final design at much greater cost and with much greater delay, not to mention the operational qualitative differences in the vehicles).
The point is that there are people who make the argument that this sort of thing (manned spaceflight) is still as hard as ever, and only NASA knows how to do it. Thus the comparison of NASA’s early attempts with contemporary success by commercial entities is quite apt.
SpaceX is what? 4-3 in successful launches across Falcon 1 and 9? This last launch was truly moment. Validating a rocket is still a painful exercise; and I’d love to see more pieces on how emerging launch providers have dealt with the problem over the past decade and a half.
I agree that it’s not quite fair to compare Dragon’s first test flight to the first Mercury test flights. They were true pioneers and were literally making it up as they went along.
I’ve seen numerous comments around the blogosphere to the effect of, “Big deal. NASA did this 50 years ago.” The funny thing is, I was thinking of Mercury while following Dragon’s flight. The early Mercury flights went from launch to splashdown over a span of a few hours. The whole nation stopped what they were doing to follow them.
In this case, the whole nation didn’t follow Dragon, but I certainly did. I’m old enough to remember Gemini but a little too young to remember Mercury. So Dragon’s flight gave me a small taste of what those Mercury flights must have been like, and that in itself was fun.
The comparison to Mercury is hardly an apples to apples match up however. The engineers working on Mercury were doing something that had not been done before, SpaceX has the advantage of learning from their mistakes and 50 years of technological advancement in every applicable field. Comparing SpaceX accomplishments to NASA’s modern day lack thereof is a better and more telling story.
I agree. Comparing SpaceX’s success with Dragon compared to what NASA did with Mercury 50 years ago is like comparing their success with the Falcon 9 this year to the teething pains and failures of big rockets back in the 1960 timeframe. A lot of painful, expensive lessons were learned back then and all companies benefit from that knowledge. In the meantime, every NASA directed shuttle replacement of the past 30 years has failed.
Dragon vs. Mercury is not meant to be an apples-to-apples comparison, it’s just an anecdote describing how even NASA in its prime was far from perfect.
Obviously, there are more recent examples from today (such as comparing Falcon 9 to Ares 1-X, one a clean-sheet booster design that’s gone from idea to delivering payloads on orbit in a fairly short amount of time and for incredibly little money, the other a derivative launcher heavily based on existing systems which has only seen one extremely limited test launch of a fraction of the actual hardware of the final design at much greater cost and with much greater delay, not to mention the operational qualitative differences in the vehicles).
The point is that there are people who make the argument that this sort of thing (manned spaceflight) is still as hard as ever, and only NASA knows how to do it. Thus the comparison of NASA’s early attempts with contemporary success by commercial entities is quite apt.
SpaceX is what? 4-3 in successful launches across Falcon 1 and 9? This last launch was truly moment. Validating a rocket is still a painful exercise; and I’d love to see more pieces on how emerging launch providers have dealt with the problem over the past decade and a half.
I agree that it’s not quite fair to compare Dragon’s first test flight to the first Mercury test flights. They were true pioneers and were literally making it up as they went along.
I’ve seen numerous comments around the blogosphere to the effect of, “Big deal. NASA did this 50 years ago.” The funny thing is, I was thinking of Mercury while following Dragon’s flight. The early Mercury flights went from launch to splashdown over a span of a few hours. The whole nation stopped what they were doing to follow them.
In this case, the whole nation didn’t follow Dragon, but I certainly did. I’m old enough to remember Gemini but a little too young to remember Mercury. So Dragon’s flight gave me a small taste of what those Mercury flights must have been like, and that in itself was fun.