Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

> Economic viability is not the same goal.

They're close enough, functionally.

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

> Not in scientific edge domains.

That's JWST-style stuff, not SpaceX at this point.

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.

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.

>”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.

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.

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

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