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by sandworm101 3832 days ago
Apollo 11 was an event for all mankind, the realization of a dream. Cheap spaceflight is certainly a dream, but SpaceX isn't all mankind. It's a corporation. Even if one views Apollo as "owned" by a single country, SpaceX's achievements are owned by a single legal person, and in turn the shareholders. SpaceX has done something great, but is isn't like they are going to allow everyone else on the planet to start using their technology. This is a business.

Apollo and SpaceX, Apples and oranges.
1 comments
grondilu 3832 days ago
> but is isn't like they are going to allow everyone else on the planet to start using their technology

I don't understand. Did the Apollo program do that? Did it even intended to? NASA is a government agency, so I guess you can tell that "people", and more accurately american citizens, own it, but isn't it a bit abstract?

For the common Joe, NASA and SpaceX are two organizations that are just as opaque and difficult to join or "own".

There really is not as much difference as you seem to think, and I don't get why only Apollo 11 could be an "event for all mankind". Also SpaceX certainly is the "realization of a dream", at the very least of Musk's dream.

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sandworm101 3832 days ago
Nasa is different. As a wing of the US government many of their innovations were shared. From a public perspective, all the photos and such taken during Apollo were public domain. Earthrise, arguably the most well-known image on earth, went strait to public domain. (This might explain some of the lack of coverage given that all the media feeds were SpaceX-owned and it wasn't clear how they were to be shared.)

Engineers who worked at Apollo-era Nasa also went on to all sorts of things, carrying lots of knowhow with them. Even those working for contractors operated under a different regime than today. But the similar knowhow at SpaceX is today proprietary. We won't see any SpaceX engineers walking over to boeing to replicate the technology, not without lawsuits every which way.

I don't mean to criticize, just to illustrate that today's space-fairing corporations are not interchangeable with Nasa.

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