[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.