Nope, that’s a lazy excuse. The US space industry was dead in the early 2000s. Astronauts went to the ISS on Soyuz.

mrguyorama 7 months ago | parent | next [-]

You are simply wrong for anything other than human rated flight. They didn't have the kind of PR that NASA and Space X have, and they were never human rated, but private satellites never stopped flying on Atlas, Delta, and Titan programs that variously went from the 1960s all the way up until the 2020s. All three of those rocket programs are direct descendants of ICBM programs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launcher...

I disagree with the premise that it was lack of bombing of US infrastructure related though. Space programs are very simply the public output of ICBM programs. Most of the modern day is simply a direct descendant of ICBM programs. You like distributed and reliable communication networks like the internet? Built so ICBM silos could command each other even if certain hubs were nuked. You like the miniaturization of solid state electronics? That capability was paid for entirely by the US Air Force who wanted powerful computers under 100 pounds for advanced planes and precision ICBMs. Satellite navigation was also explicitly invented for nuclear missiles fired out of submarines to have an accurate fix for guidance purposes.

Basically the entirety of the modern world exists because the US of the cold war pumped trillions of dollars into producing ICBMs and planes that were genuinely "next gen" while every single private business takes the credit for stuff they never paid for. Computer and telecommunications companies would never have built this stuff on their own: They were fine with computers taking up an entire facility that they could rent out (cf modern clouds) and fully switched networks that were reliant on a big company to manage. None of them needed to sell you a "personal computer". None of them wanted a distributed, uncontrolled network like the Internet.

	▲	kortilla 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		> You are simply wrong for anything other than human rated flight. They didn't have the kind of PR that NASA and Space X have, and they were never human rated, but private satellites never stopped flying on Atlas, Delta, and Titan programs that variously went from the 1960s all the way up until the 2020s. Those are moribund programs that were being kept alive solely by the government because it wanted to ensure the US had launch capabilities for NRO and other classified missions. There was absolutely no innovation coming out of them to drive down costs or increase payloads. The sector was dead from an innovation perspective and a failure from a competitive perspective. Your screed about businesses taking credit for stuff is mostly unfounded. The internet’s foundation in DARPA is very well understood and acknowledged. However, all of the advancements to scale up to the scale of the internet today were pushed by Silicon Valley and academia. DARPA and the military never cared about scale and still doesn’t because it’s not a goal.

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conductr 7 months ago | parent | prev [-]

It was more of an exploration lull and not much industry had came out of it quite yet as privatization was being implemented and so it’s the case the industry was actually just being born.