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While everything you say is true, I'm not sure those are the main factors. There were two other important factors that weren't technical. First, the US was obsessed with the USSR and the cold war, so most of the money and technology went into weapons. Even the moon race was based on the cold war and not on exploration. For evidence, look at the new moon race now that the new boogie man China is going to the moon. When the USSR collapsed in 1991 there was an opportunity to refocus. The second reason is cost-plus contracts and cost maximization in the industry. I worked for a major aerospace company in the 1980's, and the whole industry was pervaded by this. They had no interest whatsoever in lowering costs, because that lowered their contract amount the next year! So for example, if a company had a contact to make a widget for $100 million, and they only spent $90 million, then the following year their contract would be reduced. With cost-plus whatever they spent was the base amount plus an amount added to that. So why on earth would they want to reduce costs? They wanted to maximize costs within the limits of the contract. Third, according to a talk by Robert Zubrin several other billionaires tried to build rockets and all failed. Compare Bezos Blue Origin with SpaceX. That's because Bezos is a glorified salesman and knows nothing about engineering, and Musk is a physicist and engineer. And as you said, space is hard.

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Regarding Clubhouse. The argument is wrong. Skype was released in 2003. Cellphone conferencing was available in the 1990s. Multi-user phone connections were a technical possibility since the first phone networks were created. It would have been trivial to create Clubhouse on a mobile or on a stationery phone at any period in time (or on a Minitel in 1980s). A Clubhouse on a PC could be created (with avatars and a good UI) in late 1990s. In fact, the Mother of all Demos (1968) featured simultaneous video/audio communication overlayed on the computer interface. Various telepresence technologies were in use in ARC in the 1970s. Building Clubhouse was trivial at any period in time. The only difference now is the availability of cheap venture capital to fund arbitrarily frivolous projects as long as the potential for exponential growth is there. Trust me, I am a UI historian and an IT architect.

I don't know whether something similar can be said about SpaceX, but my guess would be that technically it is possible. The Lunar Lander did something similar to what Falcon rockets do. There doesn't seem to be any radical differences between a Soyuz and a Falcon. Yes, a Falcon is engineered using modern tech. But that doen't allow one to argue that you could not land boosters in the 1960s (even automatically).

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https://youtu.be/4TxkE_oYrjU

plz watch this

Looks like the author just took the figures from mainstream media which is just sad. Most of musk's ventures are actually on the scammy side nowadays

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Also the case of WWW is actually a good counterargument, because the basic ideas for hypertext were in place long before the WWW and the Web was/is actually a very bad technical solution, but for market and various other secondary reasons it won and became the standard.

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I'm still confused (assuming that your effort to draw lines through that graph is fair and there really was a 1970 - 2000 period of rocket stagnation).

Grant that it takes technology for rockets to improve. And grant that there will be some delay as you incorporate that technology into new rockets.

How come this didn't happen from 1970 - 2000, but did happen after that? Wasn't there interesting new rocket technology in 1960 and 1970 which, after a delay, could have been incorporated into new rockets in 1980 or 1990?

It sounds like this post is claiming there was a sudden spurt of improvement in rocket-relevant technology around the 1990s, which after a ten year delay got incorporated into rockets in the 2010s. But that just passes the buck. Why was there a sudden spurt in technology then, but not in other times that could have gotten it incorporated in the 1980s or 1990s? It sounds like the only answer here is "punctuated equilibrium", which is just another name for the problem.

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