| Booster reusability is massive, and if starship flies that will be quite a bit beyond that. They are charging not much less than ULA for some launches because they can, and to recoup R&D expanses. The cost per launch to them is much lower. I do however agree that technologically it’s incremental. Look up the DC-X. NASA and Lockheed had flown VTVL test boosters before. Werner von Braun talked about them. Starship is basically what he wanted to evolve Saturn V into. (Not at all belittling the achievements of SpaceX engineers. Space flight is truly brutally hard even if you are doing what’s been done before let alone innovating at all.) But none of that went anywhere because by the 1990s you had a stolid conservative industry happy with expendable rockets and cost plus contracts. It didn’t move until a lunatic swaggered in and turned over the table. Bureaucracies and stolid industries generally have to be kicked and beaten and dragged into the future. They are happy to cash checks, moo, and chew cud. Same goes for EVs. Marketable EVs have been possible since the GM EV1. There was demand too; GM had to pry those prototypes away from people. But the car industry was set in its ways. It must go vroom vroom or it’s not a car, and then there is the huge oil industry with all its lobbyists and PR. Again it took an unhinged lunatic to say “fuck you all we are doing this” and basically shame the industry into moving by showing them up. If Tesla fails it will be because Tesla succeeded. The big car companies are probably better at making cars and may outcompete Tesla once they actually decide to move. The same personality willing to offend millions to bring trolls back to Twitter is the same sort of personality it apparently takes to whip conservative bureaucracies and industries into action. The only other force I am aware of that can do it is government mandate, and that carries a more literal whip. That wasn’t going to happen for rockets or EVs due to regulatory capture and conflicts of interest. Edit: I guess the other force is war, which is why war has tended to bring innovation. But I’ll take Elon Musk types with all their negative traits over war any day. |