From First Principles

Episode

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  S1E2 — The Shuttle Gamble | How NASA Lost the Moon 25.07.2026 2j 44mnt

  After the triumph of Apollo, NASA faced an unexpected problem: what came next?In Episode 2 of From First Principles, we explore the difficult years following the Moon landings as shrinking budgets, changing public priorities, and political realities forced NASA to reinvent itself. Rather than pushing onward to Mars, the agency bet its future on a revolutionary idea—a reusable Space Shuttle that promised to make access to space routine and affordable.We examine how that vision evolved from early concepts into the Shuttle that ultimately flew, and how repeated compromises driven by cost, military requirements, and engineering constraints fundamentally changed the vehicle's design. Along the way, we explain why solid rocket boosters were chosen, how the Shuttle's ambitious goals created unexpected complexity, and why early warning signs inside the program began to be normalized.This episode sets the stage for one of the most consequential engineering stories in modern history, showing how the decisions made in the 1970s shaped not only the Challenger and Columbia disasters, but also the philosophy behind companies like SpaceX decades later.
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  S1E1 — The Early Days | From Hitler's V2 to SpaceX's Falcon 9 31.05.2026 2j 35mnt

  With speculation growing around a potential SpaceX IPO, we wanted to start at the beginning.In the first episode of From First Principles, we trace the origins of modern rocketry from the ideas of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the experiments of Robert H. Goddard to the V-2 rocket of World War II. Along the way, we explain how rockets work, why staging was such a breakthrough, and how early enthusiasts transformed science fiction into engineering reality.We then follow the paths of Wernher von Braun and Sergei Korolev as post-war missile development evolved into the Space Race, culminating in the Soviet R-7—the rocket that opened the door to the space age.This episode is the first chapter in a larger series that will eventually take us through Apollo, the Space Shuttle, satellite communications, the rise of private space companies, and ultimately to the emergence of SpaceX and a potential public offering. Before we can understand where the industry is going, we need to understand how it started.