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Comment by aleyan | Hacker News Reader

That makes sense.

There is also a question of will though. IANARS (I am not a rocket scientist), but it seems to me a lot of political investment behind rockets in USA and USSR was military in origin. This meant the rockets and rocket engines they spent most effort on was for single delivery of a warhead with no chance of reuse. Civilian rocketry was just a byproduct of efforts to deliver the bomb. We see this with Russian commercial satellite launches using repurposed ICBMs. If military didn't care about the reuse, the civilian programs would have had to work on it on their own.

I believe that with enough will and advances in technology, engineering problems for reusable rocket engines could be overcome.

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Yep, the whole industry, including payload manufacturing and operational economics, is geared around super-high launch costs. That means you spare no expense making sure your payload is absolutely perfect. High costs of launch breed high costs for payload design and manufacture, which means you need to guarantee a high chance of getting your precious payload to orbit, which means you want a pristine rocket to carry it for the best chance of a successful launch. It's a vicious cycle, driving up quality requirements and costs at every point in the cycle.

SpaceX is intending to break that cycle. If launch costs are low, then you can afford to put cheap payloads into orbit. If the payload fails, just launch another one. If the best chance of a successful launch matters a lot to you, pay a premium to launch on a virgin booster.

However re-usability of the first stage is only going to get them so far. If half the total cost of a launch (pure guess) is in the booster hardware, and they get just 10 launches out of each one, then the total cost per launch will be cut to close to half of what it is now. That's great, amazing even, but it's not 10x cheaper and certainly not 100x. To get down even close to 10x cheaper they need to recover the second stage as well.

A huge amount of investment in rocketry in the US was very much civilian. Easily a quarter of a trillion dollars, and that's excluding Apollo. However, that money was not well spent.

I could go into the topic in depth but suffice it to say that politics and bureaucracy have had a stranglehold on NASA manned spaceflight and launch vehicle development since the beginning, and that has had a very negative impact on progress and capabilities. In contrast, unmanned spaceflight at NASA has been, comparatively, much better managed. And there you see a much clearer and sharper continual increase in capabilities, ambition, missions, and so on over time. The missions that would have been acceptable in the 1970s (planetary flybys, for example) would today not return enough science to be justified. Today we have multi-year rover missions on Mars, and we have spacecraft which rendezvous and orbit multiple asteroids using ion engines. Meanwhile, in manned spaceflight we haven't been out of Earth orbit since the early '70s.

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