> We stopped doing serious space development after Apollo and lost a ton of institutional knowledge between then and when SpaceX started picking up where they left off.
Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.
(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)
> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.
Yup. This is part of why I really love watching For All Mankind. I love the idea of an alternate history where the space race effectively never ended. In that universe, in 1974 they were farther along than we are today.
(Yes, I know, it's fictional, and even had the space race never ended in real life, the rate of progress would probably not have been as fast as it is in the show. But I can dream...)
> Boeing has not done a lot of spacecraft design and manufacturing recently. They've spent a bunch of "time" on it, but haven't actually produced much.
And, arguably, the Boeing doing spacecraft stuff today is not the same Boeing that did spacecraft stuff decades ago, from a management and organizational culture standpoint.