[bumby]

That’s kinda the point.

40 years ago it was questionable whether it was technically possible. It was “JWST-stuff”. The forerunners of ULA showed it was feasible.

20 years ago it was questionable whether it was economically viable. SpaceX changed that.

Your previous statement was too vague to make the distinction and implied Spacex did both, while ignoring the contributions of the previous group.

[Robotbeat]

Engineers became really jaded by Shuttle and the failure o X-33. Many of them, inappropriately, started claiming it was impossible. You still hear people claiming things are impossible today that are “merely” very hard, like full reuse, getting launch costs same order of magnitude as transpacific air freight, orbital datacenters, terraforming Mars, space settlement in general, travel to other star systems, etc.

[bumby]

>”claiming it was impossible”

Again, what do you mean by “it”? Economic viability? I already stated I agree with that. Technologically viable? I disagree, since the proof of concept was shown decades earlier. We don’t need to to keep going around and around this point.

[Robotbeat]

Nope. Technological possibility of landing on a droneship was claimed to be impossible. And yes, of course it was never actually impossible. The technical expert was obviously wrong even at the time, kind of shockingly so, but you see similar kinds of claims of impossibility today by so-called experts.

[bumby]

Annnd…we’re full circle. Again, DC-X was considered a successful proof of concept. Almost 40 years ago. Musk himself said SpaceX was “just continuing the great work of the DC-X project."

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3556/1