Odysseus has less than a day left on the Moon before it freezes to death::So what are we to make of this? Is Odysseus a success or a failure?
And it’s doing it for around 0,05% of the price. (~$250 billion adjusted for inflation for Apollo 1 vs ~$120 million for IM-1)
Capitalism is all about efficiency. An efficient total loss is somehow a win!
That might be the case right? Let’s say there a percentage chance that would have succeeded call it 10%
Now your first attempt fails, maybe because of some miscalculation or lack of engineering precision
Even if the older way more expensive version had a 100% success rate you’d probably still rather the cheaper version right?
Also not sure how this is about capitalism, replace the above for material cost and it’s the same thing
And money is the only cost that matters, right? Let’s not be concerned about the material waste involved in the launch or the pollution that’s building up in outer space with each failure.
This kind of business oriented mindset is why Boeing planes are falling out of the sky and dropping their bolts.
Also the cost being cited for those early space programs involved an immense amount of breakthrough R&D which the newer programs ought to be benefiting from; there’s no reason to believe that a government program doing the same work as these private companies today would cost as much as they did in the early days. It’s not even a meaningful quantitative comparison in the first place.
TBF that’s a cheat. They didn’t have to be the ones investigating, researching, and developing everything to make it all work for the first time.
The science today is very well established. While it doesn’t lessen the difficulty, nobody is reinventing the wheel at full price. They’re standing on the shoulders of very well established giants.
