[1shooner]

>“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.

[ceejayoz]

ULA was openly skeptical about the viability of landing at all. Then reuse. Then the goalposts moved to this, repeated reuse.

[bumby]

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).

[ceejayoz]

https://x.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1251155738421899273

Tory Bruno saying "no one has come anywhere near close to demonstrating these economic sustainability goals".

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-critic-ula-ceo-reusable-roc...

> “We have not really changed our assessment over the last couple of years because we have yet to see the other forms of reusability—flyback or propulsive return to Earth—demonstrate economic sustainability on a recurring basis. It’s pretty darn hard to make that actually save money… We’ve seen nothing yet that changes our analysis on that,” the ULA CEO said.

> The ULA CEO’s points about the possible lack of savings on reusable rockets put him in stark contrast with other noteworthy leaders in the space industry. Apart from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin is also intently focused on using reusable rockets. Even Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, whose company designs and launches small rockets, has embraced the idea of reusing previously-flown boosters.

[bumby]

Economic viability is not the same goal. One is a business goal, one is a scientific/technological one. The goal from the DC-X 35+ years ago was the latter. Certainly, we'd expect the economics to improve since then.

The technological viability was shown with the proof of concept. If you meant strictly economic viability was unknown, I agree with you. This isn't meant to disparage SpaceX. They're doing great. I would say there is a risk that isn't often talked about which is the quality risk. Early on, SpaceX disregarded well-known quality control checks, presumably because they didn't think they were worth the time/cost. When that burned them, they integrated those checks. Do that enough times, the economic viability erodes.

[ceejayoz]

> Economic viability is not the same goal.

They're close enough, functionally.

[bumby]

Not in scientific edge domains. Eg: quantum computing is shown to be scientifically feasible right now, but nowhere close to having economic viability in a business sense. Same with fusion etc etc