• winterayars
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    23 days ago

    I’d measure it by number of objectives completed.

    How many commercial space flight programs landed on the moon? SpaceX was founded in 2002, over two decades ago. It had decades of public engineering data and knowledge to build on. In 1957, Sputnik made it to space, the first artificial satellite in the history of Earth. In 1969, humans landed on the moon.

    • Pennomi@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      23 days ago

      I think the goals and scale of these efforts aren’t comparable. Best to compare apples to apples.

      • winterayars
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        23 days ago

        You’re right, the goal of getting to the moon and scale of the effort was much bigger than putting satellites into space, even if they’ve put a lot of satellites into space. They had to invent crewed rockets. Nobody knew how to take an explosion and put a human person on top of it and surf that up to space, then people figured out how. Without that work, SpaceX (and friends) would not exist now.