I Some time in the past decade, we discovered there was a whole universe of possibilities right above our heads, and the private space race began anew.
While everything you say is true, I'm not sure those are the main factors. There were two other important factors that weren't technical. First, the US was obsessed with the USSR and the cold war, so most of the money and technology went into weapons. Even the moon race was based on the cold war and not on exploration. For evidence, look at the new moon race now that the new boogie man China is going to the moon. When the USSR collapsed in 1991 there was an opportunity to refocus. The second reason is cost-plus contracts and cost maximization in the industry. I worked for a major aerospace company in the 1980's, and the whole industry was pervaded by this. They had no interest whatsoever in lowering costs, because that lowered their contract amount the next year! So for example, if a company had a contact to make a widget for $100 million, and they only spent $90 million, then the following year their contract would be reduced. With cost-plus whatever they spent was the base amount plus an amount added to that. So why on earth would they want to reduce costs? They wanted to maximize costs within the limits of the contract. Third, according to a talk by Robert Zubrin several other billionaires tried to build rockets and all failed. Compare Bezos Blue Origin with SpaceX. That's because Bezos is a glorified salesman and knows nothing about engineering, and Musk is a physicist and engineer. And as you said, space is hard.
Yes the cost plus contracts definitely didn't incentivise the market much. And it's an interesting point that there needed to be external motivation in some sense to wake up the sleepy industry. What I was particularly interested in here is the intrinsic technological factors, as they're exogenous and if there was continuous development *might* have shaken up the social side.
Regarding Clubhouse. The argument is wrong. Skype was released in 2003. Cellphone conferencing was available in the 1990s. Multi-user phone connections were a technical possibility since the first phone networks were created. It would have been trivial to create Clubhouse on a mobile or on a stationery phone at any period in time (or on a Minitel in 1980s). A Clubhouse on a PC could be created (with avatars and a good UI) in late 1990s. In fact, the Mother of all Demos (1968) featured simultaneous video/audio communication overlayed on the computer interface. Various telepresence technologies were in use in ARC in the 1970s. Building Clubhouse was trivial at any period in time. The only difference now is the availability of cheap venture capital to fund arbitrarily frivolous projects as long as the potential for exponential growth is there. Trust me, I am a UI historian and an IT architect.
I don't know whether something similar can be said about SpaceX, but my guess would be that technically it is possible. The Lunar Lander did something similar to what Falcon rockets do. There doesn't seem to be any radical differences between a Soyuz and a Falcon. Yes, a Falcon is engineered using modern tech. But that doen't allow one to argue that you could not land boosters in the 1960s (even automatically).
Hmm - I think being technically able to do something isn't the same as being able to commercialise it. To do the latter you need to be able to test multiple iterations and make it cost affordable, and available to folks at large. Even if you could make an affordable service similar to clubhouse earlier, you couldn't count on it getting widely adopted as you couldn't iterate multiple times, since you had to build the stack underneath. That's what I was getting at.
Re spacex it's slightly diff as though the eventual outcomes look similar, the underlying mechanics of operations are quite different - in materials, software, design etc. What they needed to do required the tech to catch up in many cases. Re www though, you could be right. I don't know enough about the "what if" scenario here.
Also the case of WWW is actually a good counterargument, because the basic ideas for hypertext were in place long before the WWW and the Web was/is actually a very bad technical solution, but for market and various other secondary reasons it won and became the standard.
I'm still confused (assuming that your effort to draw lines through that graph is fair and there really was a 1970 - 2000 period of rocket stagnation).
Grant that it takes technology for rockets to improve. And grant that there will be some delay as you incorporate that technology into new rockets.
How come this didn't happen from 1970 - 2000, but did happen after that? Wasn't there interesting new rocket technology in 1960 and 1970 which, after a delay, could have been incorporated into new rockets in 1980 or 1990?
It sounds like this post is claiming there was a sudden spurt of improvement in rocket-relevant technology around the 1990s, which after a ten year delay got incorporated into rockets in the 2010s. But that just passes the buck. Why was there a sudden spurt in technology then, but not in other times that could have gotten it incorporated in the 1980s or 1990s? It sounds like the only answer here is "punctuated equilibrium", which is just another name for the problem.
My argument was that the rush since 2000s was contingent on other tech developed during the 80s and 90s. So the new materials, compute power etc were just not available earlier. This has 2 impacts - ones that you can't iterate much and try new methods and twos that the modern designs and consequent cost reductions just weren't possible. That's kind of my thesis on punctuated equilibrium. Most stagnation theories either argue end of all low hanging fruit (Gordon etc) or ask why we haven't continued the straight line growth, with the answer being institutions/ lack of ambition/ bureaucracy/ gremlins, and I'm arguing for a slightly more contingent view of growth.
After Reagan signed the commercialisation in the 80s there was another 15 years before Branson and Musk felt there's potential for a private endeavour to succeed. There were satellite companies though which worked in the interim (Hughes et al). Like you say though there's another aspect to assess on whether any of them, were they ambitious enough, could've also harnessed some cost reductions. Harry's paper suggests slim chances, but it's probably not the final word. When I've spoken to folks at telesat, oneweb etc, they think so too, that it's not just a matter of ambition, but a matter of tech.
While everything you say is true, I'm not sure those are the main factors. There were two other important factors that weren't technical. First, the US was obsessed with the USSR and the cold war, so most of the money and technology went into weapons. Even the moon race was based on the cold war and not on exploration. For evidence, look at the new moon race now that the new boogie man China is going to the moon. When the USSR collapsed in 1991 there was an opportunity to refocus. The second reason is cost-plus contracts and cost maximization in the industry. I worked for a major aerospace company in the 1980's, and the whole industry was pervaded by this. They had no interest whatsoever in lowering costs, because that lowered their contract amount the next year! So for example, if a company had a contact to make a widget for $100 million, and they only spent $90 million, then the following year their contract would be reduced. With cost-plus whatever they spent was the base amount plus an amount added to that. So why on earth would they want to reduce costs? They wanted to maximize costs within the limits of the contract. Third, according to a talk by Robert Zubrin several other billionaires tried to build rockets and all failed. Compare Bezos Blue Origin with SpaceX. That's because Bezos is a glorified salesman and knows nothing about engineering, and Musk is a physicist and engineer. And as you said, space is hard.
Yes the cost plus contracts definitely didn't incentivise the market much. And it's an interesting point that there needed to be external motivation in some sense to wake up the sleepy industry. What I was particularly interested in here is the intrinsic technological factors, as they're exogenous and if there was continuous development *might* have shaken up the social side.
Regarding Clubhouse. The argument is wrong. Skype was released in 2003. Cellphone conferencing was available in the 1990s. Multi-user phone connections were a technical possibility since the first phone networks were created. It would have been trivial to create Clubhouse on a mobile or on a stationery phone at any period in time (or on a Minitel in 1980s). A Clubhouse on a PC could be created (with avatars and a good UI) in late 1990s. In fact, the Mother of all Demos (1968) featured simultaneous video/audio communication overlayed on the computer interface. Various telepresence technologies were in use in ARC in the 1970s. Building Clubhouse was trivial at any period in time. The only difference now is the availability of cheap venture capital to fund arbitrarily frivolous projects as long as the potential for exponential growth is there. Trust me, I am a UI historian and an IT architect.
I don't know whether something similar can be said about SpaceX, but my guess would be that technically it is possible. The Lunar Lander did something similar to what Falcon rockets do. There doesn't seem to be any radical differences between a Soyuz and a Falcon. Yes, a Falcon is engineered using modern tech. But that doen't allow one to argue that you could not land boosters in the 1960s (even automatically).
Hmm - I think being technically able to do something isn't the same as being able to commercialise it. To do the latter you need to be able to test multiple iterations and make it cost affordable, and available to folks at large. Even if you could make an affordable service similar to clubhouse earlier, you couldn't count on it getting widely adopted as you couldn't iterate multiple times, since you had to build the stack underneath. That's what I was getting at.
Re spacex it's slightly diff as though the eventual outcomes look similar, the underlying mechanics of operations are quite different - in materials, software, design etc. What they needed to do required the tech to catch up in many cases. Re www though, you could be right. I don't know enough about the "what if" scenario here.
I'm fascinated by the "UI Historian" part - can you share any of your work?
https://youtu.be/4TxkE_oYrjU
plz watch this
Looks like the author just took the figures from mainstream media which is just sad. Most of musk's ventures are actually on the scammy side nowadays
Also the case of WWW is actually a good counterargument, because the basic ideas for hypertext were in place long before the WWW and the Web was/is actually a very bad technical solution, but for market and various other secondary reasons it won and became the standard.
I'm still confused (assuming that your effort to draw lines through that graph is fair and there really was a 1970 - 2000 period of rocket stagnation).
Grant that it takes technology for rockets to improve. And grant that there will be some delay as you incorporate that technology into new rockets.
How come this didn't happen from 1970 - 2000, but did happen after that? Wasn't there interesting new rocket technology in 1960 and 1970 which, after a delay, could have been incorporated into new rockets in 1980 or 1990?
It sounds like this post is claiming there was a sudden spurt of improvement in rocket-relevant technology around the 1990s, which after a ten year delay got incorporated into rockets in the 2010s. But that just passes the buck. Why was there a sudden spurt in technology then, but not in other times that could have gotten it incorporated in the 1980s or 1990s? It sounds like the only answer here is "punctuated equilibrium", which is just another name for the problem.
My argument was that the rush since 2000s was contingent on other tech developed during the 80s and 90s. So the new materials, compute power etc were just not available earlier. This has 2 impacts - ones that you can't iterate much and try new methods and twos that the modern designs and consequent cost reductions just weren't possible. That's kind of my thesis on punctuated equilibrium. Most stagnation theories either argue end of all low hanging fruit (Gordon etc) or ask why we haven't continued the straight line growth, with the answer being institutions/ lack of ambition/ bureaucracy/ gremlins, and I'm arguing for a slightly more contingent view of growth.
After Reagan signed the commercialisation in the 80s there was another 15 years before Branson and Musk felt there's potential for a private endeavour to succeed. There were satellite companies though which worked in the interim (Hughes et al). Like you say though there's another aspect to assess on whether any of them, were they ambitious enough, could've also harnessed some cost reductions. Harry's paper suggests slim chances, but it's probably not the final word. When I've spoken to folks at telesat, oneweb etc, they think so too, that it's not just a matter of ambition, but a matter of tech.