| Yes, unironically. In the USA you have the SLS, which can only be described as a congressionally designed failure. Past experiments by NASA for self landing rockets had their funding denied as well. In the EU there was the Arianespace CEO who explicitly said that self landing rockets were a waste of time. In Japan, space experimentation and failures are such a public nightmare we would never have bothered. The idea of losing dozens of rockets in order to aim for reusability would have been untenable. Starship would not exist. Because the idea of a rocket with that many engines on the booster was also believed to be impractical. Elon is egomaniacal sure, but that's only magnified by his status as a CEO. His behavior, unfortunately pretty close to the average person. Doesn't change the fact that SpaceX under his leadership is the only reason we have reusable rockets, or the ridiculously ambitious Starship launches. No one could have predicted the current incredible cadence of launches by SpaceX either. |