>> Notwithstanding the millions that NASA gave them in their early stages.
And the billions spent on the technologies that allow those engines to exist. SpaceX didn't invent rocket engines. It stands on the shoulders of many giants going back through Apollo to the early days. There are even traces of Soviet tech in the raptor (ie closed cycle). Nearly all of that work was funded by taxpayers ... and by whatever funded the soviet programs.
Building a better mousetrap is great, but that doesn't mean that all the previous mousetraps were not also great too.
Watching the Falcon Heavy take off & land was one of the coolest things in my life. Watching Starship take off, land, and blow up was neat. The fact that these things build on previous accomplishments doesn’t make them any less impressive. Enjoy the ride & don’t poop on the party.
Legitimate criticism of SpaceX fanboys is not "Pooping on the party". People who pretend that this is a ground-up space program, an icon of how private enterprise is always better at everything, need to be educated in the history of spaceflight. I myself could build a car in my garage that is better/faster/cheaper than everything available in decades past. That doesn't mean that I am one iota smarter, better organized or more innovative than the engineers who built those classic cars.
The problems is other who are standing on the same shoulder of the same giants, even the original giants themselves fail to turn this theoretical advantage into actually being
> better/faster/cheaper than everything
So do talking down SpaceX based on that makes no sense.
If you truly believe that you can make a car that is significantly better than the current state of the art AND turn it into a viable business at scale, then what are you waiting for? You’ll be a billionaire.
Just ... No. Read the history. At least read Wikipedia.
"Staged combustion (Замкнутая схема) was first proposed by Alexey Isaev in 1949. The first staged combustion engine was the S1.5400 (11D33) used in the Soviet planetary rocket, designed by Melnikov, a former assistant to Isaev.[1] About the same time (1959), Nikolai Kuznetsov began work on the closed cycle engine NK-9 for Korolev's orbital ICBM, GR-1. Kuznetsov later evolved that design into the NK-15 and NK-33 engines for the unsuccessful Lunar N1 rocket. The non-cryogenic N2O4/UDMH engine RD-253 using staged combustion was developed by Valentin Glushko circa 1963 for the Proton rocket."
And way down at the bottom of a long engine list spanning more than half a century...
"Raptor—SpaceX LCH4/LOX engine in development, first flown in 2019[19][20]"
> The first flight test of a full-flow staged-combustion engine occurred on 25 July 2019 when SpaceX flew their Raptor methalox FFSC engine at their South Texas Launch Site.[8]
(Yes, there are others listed, but SpaceX was first to actually fly something.)
The "long engine list" is only 3 deep, none of which besides the raptor made it past the test stand. What matters is full-flow-ness, not staged-ness, which means running neither oxidizer- or fuel- rich, for maximum efficiency. And in any case the russian engine was N2O2/UDMH and the american prior art was hydralox, so it's not like spacex didn't have to do a TON of figuring out to get a methalox FF engine up and running.
I'm not trying to detract from the monumental achievement SpaceX's engineers have made with the development of the Raptor, but that development work didn't take place in a vacuum. Unfortunately, I don't have a credible source for this, but I have seen multiple reports that the Raptor program was explicitly a continuation of the IPD program, with SpaceX receiving technical data, hardware, and even hiring engineers who worked on it.
That the IPD was hydrolox and didn't proceed to the point of a full engine, let alone a flight is besides the point.
What you said was: "They kind of did invent full-flow engines though", which is completely false.
And the billions spent on the technologies that allow those engines to exist. SpaceX didn't invent rocket engines. It stands on the shoulders of many giants going back through Apollo to the early days. There are even traces of Soviet tech in the raptor (ie closed cycle). Nearly all of that work was funded by taxpayers ... and by whatever funded the soviet programs.
Building a better mousetrap is great, but that doesn't mean that all the previous mousetraps were not also great too.