This is good, there should always be friendly competition between Nations to drive Space Exploration. I hope this lights a bigger fire under the ass of the current US Administration and NASA to push ahead harder, faster and farther. The US doesn't know how lucky they are to have SpaceX and Musk.
Absolutely. He wasn't given $100B, he took a grant from the government to build something that they wanted and was able to parlay that into two incredible companies that are changing the world as we know it. You can attack the man for who he is, what he says, and whatever else you want, but saying that we didn't get something of value for the investment that the US made is ridiculous. He got filthy rich but we all got something in return.
China, Iran, and NK may be authoritarian regimes, but the US is still the only nation in the world to have used nuclear weapons in an act of war, a move which killed probably 100,000 civilians.
The remote authoritarian regime you fear the most have the covid-19 pandemic well under control for its people. And you still have to deal with the virus at your doorstep in your non-authoritarian paradise. How good is that?
SpaceX is no doubt cool. Nonetheless we're discussing China landing its first rover on a planet NASA's been flying a helicopter around for the last month. I mean, both are great accomplishments, but if you have to treat it as a competition and pick a winner...
Not to pour water on your statement, I'd say that the rate of change counts more. Nailing your first landing attempt on a powered descent (rocket-crate equivalent) is no mean feat. I'm actually pleasantly surprised given the high failure rate of Mars missions.
Four governmental organizations have landed on Mars. Can’t forget the Russians and Europeans did it first. But that’s besides the point because I provided a hyperbole where my rate of change was significant but not newsworthy. We aren’t celebrating them because they went from there the fastest but because they went there at all. How fast isn’t noteworthy because they’re standing on the shoulders of giants. They literally copied the design of our rover from 20 years ago and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had stolen a lot of those tech specs from nasa long ago
I'd agree rate of change counts more if both parties were at comparable technology levels. When you're still playing catchup there's a lot of opportunities to take certain engineering shortcuts.
