[ChuckMcM]

I agree that the impact of reusing the space craft is overlooked by many people. I tried to explain to a person that we could not go back to the moon today if we wanted too. And their argument was "hey we did it before, we have all those old plans, we could just build another Saturn V/Apollo system and be back in however long that took. And having talked with folks at Kennedy Space center, and read the discussions in Air & Space hosted by the Smithsonian, I know that many of the key things we "knew" about operationally building a moon capable rocket we would have to "re-learn". The original folks are gone.

All we could do would be to speed up the learning a bit by throwing money at building multiple test case rockets without any means of creating a sustainable system.

So yes, SpaceX has made a huge step. It will be interesting to see how others approach the problem (and everyone who wants to be competitive in the launch space will have to have an answer at some point). And yes, not a lot of people have realized how big a step that is. But a few years from now when SpaceX goes public perhaps and their S-1 shows just how much of an advantage this gives them, I'm confident people will look back and say, "That was when we re-entered the space age for 'real'."

[atopal]

Not sure what you are talking about. The SLS is in active development at the moment. An unmanned Orion capsule is planned to orbit the moon in November 2018, followed by manned missions 3 years after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

[ChuckMcM]

There is a great discussion at the Kennedy Space center visitor's complex about all of the Apollo knowledge they are re-learning and improving on with the SLS. From trying to re-create the F1 engine (in the F1a) to spacecraft management systems. There are tales (perhaps apocryphal) about going to senior centers to talk to some of the original engineers. The narrative is very much that this sort of ship/endeavour was a lost art which they are recreating from artifacts, new research, and people who were there at the time.

I cannot judge how accurate that narrative is though.

[secstate]

For starters, Orion is still planned to cost from $500 million to $1 billion PER LAUNCH. Given that this is a government project, I'm gonna guess closer to the high bound.

Second, the Saturn V/Apollo mission was a diplomatic show of muscle. Those who believe the SLS will be the future of manned space travel fail to appreciate that without the pressure of the Soviet Union, there is absolutely no way the project will outlast the attrition of a 10-year non-wartime Congressional budget session.

And all that is moot anyway, as the Saturn V and Apollo systems were built extremely fast, and to do that meant using a myriad of sub contractors [0].

According to Ars[1], the SLS basically had to reverse engineer an F-1 that was pulled from one of the Apollo launches. There were no extant blueprints for a massive LOX/RP engine, and few people alive who had any experience with it. SCUD missile builders with deep government contacts and ensured the STS (Space Shuttle) system would largely rely on the force of solid boosters, with the LOX engines significantly reduced in size and totally different from the Saturn V boosters.

More than anything, the Ars article points out how absurdly homebrewed the Saturn V was. Hand drilled nozzle ports? The system was hacked together for one purpose, and then discarded. What Space X is doing, and what SLS will fail to do, is make orbit accessible to people besides a government that controls the world's fiat currency and can basically do what it wants provided it has the political capital (as it did during the Cold War).

The Saturn V and Apollo system will stand as one of the greatest achievements of the modern era. But, like the Pyramids of Giza, it did little to spur a sea change of similar technology. There is no great proliferation of massive pyramids after those at Giza were built. And there was no great proliferation of human landings on extra-terrestrial surfaces after Saturn V.

Elon Musk's goal in space is more similar to George Fuller, using revolutions in contracting to build big buildings cheaply. After Fuller, huge and tall interior spaces became cheap to build and those buildings proliferated around the globe.

0: http://amyshirateitel.com/2011/04/03/the-lost-art-of-the-sat... 1: http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/how-nasa-brought-the-...