Monday, February 07, 2011

Neal Stephenson on Rockets

Neal Stephenson write in Salon, Space stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation. It's a pretty amazing (and for him amazingly short) history of rockets and survey of the current economics of them.

1 comment:

Karl said...

Fascinating read. Blaming rockets on Hitler, might be a bit of a stretch, but I can totally relate to how inertia down a certain path limits innovation. I have a vague recollection of a commercially developed rail gun style launch system they were working on about 10 years ago when I was involved in those sorts of things, but I don't think anything ever came of it. I'm not sure I'd agree rockets can't get any better though. Incremental changes (like Sea Launch, for instance) can still move the field forward over time. I mean, take a look at the hard drive industry. They've been say that has hit the limits of physics for a long time now too.