Re: SpaceX docked the first private spacecraft on a spacesta
tuypo1 wrote:
the united states realizes they never should have given up and start having nasa do stuff again.
Well, SpaceX is an American company, albeit owned by a guy with ties to many countries (but currently an American citizen I think).
Aside from that, the only thing we gave up doing was sending humans to the moon, presumably because it was costly, dangerous and not particularly beneficial. NASA does still send astronauts into space a good bit, to space stations like the one Dragon docked at, and they send probes all over the place and robots to planets and such. Supposedly, they're working on such things as warp drives now.
However, NASA is a government agency, and as such has plenty of politics and other lag in it which make it particularly inefficient (a lot of the politics result in things like people can't be fired, and it's better to not do too much at any given time so that there can always be a measurement of improvement without having to go to insane lengths for it, also sometimes things are done inefficiently for the sake of doing something). Maybe some private sector competition can kick things into gear, who knows, though I don't know that SpaceX is willing to put the investment into getting to other planets for some time or not.
