No serious really argued that; what they argued is that a Mars colony is impractical, interplanetary travel as a fantasy, and data centers in space as delusional.
>“When you talk about conventional technologies on a booster like you see other people doing, and being able to recover and reuse that booster 15 times with relatively minimial refurbishmoent costs, that’s pretty darn challenging, and maybe not the right place, in our view, to start on that problem,” Bruno said.
This doesn't really sound like doubting any claim; he's talking about how his organization was approaching it given their limited resources.
I think that misremembers or misrepresents history.
The DC-X was program developed in the early 1990s expressly to prove the feasibility of orbital rocket vertical landings and rapid turn-around/reuse. It never made it to the full orbital regime because it was scrapped early, but it was considered successful in proving the proof-of-concept. It was also managed by the predecessors of ULA (McDonnel Douglas, which later merged with Boeing).
Nah, it was everything. Everyone expects aerospace timelines to slip. That wasn’t the issue. I had an aerospace greybeard (guidance and navigation expert… nice guy, btw) from a civilian space agency that you would recognize tell me that booster landing on a droneship was “impossible.”