
Originally Posted by
reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/o5ij09/comment/h2o73bc
To specifically address the point of view of an aerospace engineering student, I’d like to share my experience as an aerospace engineering post StarshipOne and prior to SpaceX. Should shed some light on why Elon and Space X are seen as a big deal.
In that time period, the only major rocket builder in the USA was United Launch Alliance, making and operating the Atlas and Delta series. The ESA was launching Ariane series rockets, the Russians Proton series and the Chinese the Long March series. The other American big platform was discontinued, the Titan series, and NASA was going nowhere with a replacement for the Shuttle.
America had no launch programs carrying humans. The Ariane 5 was human launch capable but they’d never built a capsule. The Chinese are a black box for American engineering R&D because of their National security apparatus. So we were relying on ancient Soyuz tech to launch all manned missions.
If your were a space-focused AE student, you had limited options: work for a classified agency on classified payloads, build communications satellites, build launch vehicles for ULA, or work on hypothetical projects for NASA. Nobody took SpaceShipOne and space tourism seriously, given that it felt like a one-off for billionaire fame. SpaceShipTwo had been unveiled but hadn’t even undergone a powered test flight.
That was a bleak time to be getting into space stuff as an AE student. I got out precisely because the career opportunities weren’t interesting.
Then Space X, which most people had thought was another vanity project, got the contract for ISS resupply. They went from “oh hey maybe a little satellite launch program by a rich person” to “this is the legitimate future of commercial space flight” very quickly. December 2010 they orbit a Dragon capsule, the first orbit and recovery by a commercial company. Cool. But by May 2012, less than 18 months later, they were docking with ISS.
That suddenly thrust competition back into the US launch marketplace. You didn’t have to work for ULA on iterative improvements to a proven design. You could go to SpaceX and do interesting work on new and novel rockets and rocket concepts.
The balanced retro-thrust return was a huge deal because it was new and exciting. This was new, challenging tech that their engineers got to work (mostly). They’re launching ISS crews from America again, for the first time since the shuttle. They’re launching hundreds of new, novel satellites in a huge constellation (though the designs started a bit meh and are ass for ground-based telescopes, which the rocketry space nerds do not like because we stick with the astronomy type space nerds). They launched a car for a vanity project. They want to start sending people to the Moon and Mars.
And behind it all was Elon Musk, a very public figure. He was the man that made being an aerospace engineer with a focus on space fun and exciting again. He brought space launches back into the public psyche.
My school years in the 2000s had seen newspapers and magazines filled with think pieces about whether the age of manned space flight would end with the end of ISS. ISS was too expensive, the discoveries were too small, the budgets were too big. Let ISS die when funding ran out and stop sending up any astronauts, they’d argue.
But after I got out of AE for being utterly boring, Elon made it exciting again. And that was huge. Heck, I personally regretted a decision to move out of aerospace engineering and into more biological focused pursuits.
Elon certainly has flaws, but he was the standard bearer of the sea change of space flight. He’s both a driving force for a focus on space science and space engineering as a funder as well as the public figurehead of the push for the same.
(And FYI, if you don’t believe me, believe the AIAA. in the early 2000s the AIAA was actually facing a crisis for the future - their projections of numbers of new aerospace engineers weren’t meeting the projections of the numbers needed between replacing retiring existing members and expected needs to continue to meet targets. They needed young people to get excited about aerospace, so they started some big promotions for students to try to get them interested. They wanted a new generation of motivated engineers like they had gotten out of kids that looked at Apollo or the Shuttle and went “whoa, I want to do that!” And then followed through. But without an exciting new program for decades and none in the pipeline, it was bleak. For all some of the member companies of the AIAA might not like SpaceX (since they compete for contracts), Elon and SpaceX have basically solved the problem of finding and encouraging motivated new aerospace engineers.)