This is what Stirling is getting at with his comparison of Starship with the Spanish and Portugese caravels. People had been building boats and ships for years. Viking longships crossed the North Atlantic, and Polynesian outriggers sailed long routes in the Pacific.
But they weren’t efficient cargo carriers. They could haul people, to a limited degree, but they couldn’t support trade. In this they were much like the Apollo-era spacecraft. (And I’d include the Shuttle, which was built on 1960s and 1970s technology, in the Apollo era.)
Way back in the 1980s and 1990s we knew that it was impossible to do significant things in space without lowering costs a lot, and that the secret to lowering costs was reusability and iterative learning. But nobody did it, really, until Elon Musk.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member