Not to mention the mountain of prior art to work off of...

It's way harder to do it the first time.

philipallstar 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's absolutely loads being done for the first time here. Not least of which: running this r&d off commercial contracts instead of directly off taxpayer money.

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fastball 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The mountain of prior art being... one rocket that had very different requirements?

	▲	sho_hn 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Apollo also invented, funded and productized a lot of modern embedded computing and computer manufacturing, to keep in our lane here. Obviously SpaceX has access to a very different tech environment that yes, Apollo helped push forward. Manufacturing the Apollo Guidance Computer (which wasn't in the rocket per-se, but was wired up to it and could fly the rocket in certain scenarios) alone consumed around 40% of the US' entire IC production capacity at the time.

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FredPret 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

SpaceX IS doing lots of important things for the first time.