[fooker]

Nobody went in the direction of seamless internet payments before PayPal, despite banking existing for centuries.

Nobody went in the direction of landing boosters, despite rocketry existing for decades.

'Nobody is doing it', is more often than not, an argument for 'it' instead of against.

[stcredzero]

It's not enough to have, 'Nobody is doing it.' If you want the full Musk analysis, you also have to do a 1st principles analysis of the true cost. Then you have to identify the factors holding things up across the entire industry. Is it that government regulation and meddling is distorting the pricing and scaring away competitors? Is it an entrenched industry with no motivation to innovate?

Often nobody's doing it, because "it" is truly stupid. What Musk is doing, is applying a formula for discovering when the majority are mistaken.

http://paulgraham.com/say.html

[dingaling]

> Nobody went in the direction of landing boosters

Of course they did, but they only wanted to do it on DoD money. When that wasn't further forthcoming they pivoted to other projects that were funded.

Landing rocket as a stalled idea wasn't due to lack of technical foresight, it wad a result of big companies lacking financial foresight. I give credit to Space X for making that business leap, even though landing their boosters was actually an ad hoc response to their initial failure to secure cheap Russian engines.

[hef19898]

I once found a study from EASA, conducted in the early 2000s if I remember well, on reusing boosters. The result was, in a nutshell, technically feasible financially not so much due the low number of launches, costs to refurbish and such.

And now Arianne Space is having a serious look at it with Arianne 6.

[hef19898]

True at first glance. But the better allogy would be a better way to process cheques in the case of PayPal. And in the case of producing cars ignoring the Toyota Production System, ignoring decades of experience in high volume car manufacturing is at best incredibly arrogant.