Quote:Nonsense, NASA built the Shuttle, and before that the Saturn 5. That was the heyday of NASA, when it was still facing Soviet competition. NASA was tasked to develop human spaceflight. NASA may contract to launch robotic spacecraft, but the launch vehicles were designed and built by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. NASA has not created a new human launch vehicle since the Shuttle way back in 1982.


 

In case you didn't know it, the Atlas and Delta rockets are launched from pads in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (US military), not from Kennedy Space Center (NASA).


 

The launch vehicles from Space X and Blue Origin are nothing like the Shuttle or Saturn 5, and are not built on that knowledge.

Nothing you said contradicts my post. The fact Boeing and Lockheed Martin built the actual spacecraft doesn't change the fact that they wouldn't have done so if it weren't for a government agency paying them to do so. Neither company would have been involved in the space race if the government hadn't been involved.

 

As for the comparison of SpaceX and Blue Origin; they might differ from Saturn V and the Shuttle in some aspects but they are still built upon the knowledge of those projects. The basic design of a rocket engine hasn't changed since Robert Goddard launched the first one in 1926; it's still uses a liquid fuel mixed with an oxidizer and ignited in a combustion chamber thereby using Newton's third law of motion to create thrust. 

---