> Sometimes it works, sometimes it may not.

The way this should work is: Sometimes it works and a company is successful, and sometimes it doesn't and the company isn't successful.

Musk's apparent mode of operation is: if it works, my company is successful, and if it doesn't work, a lot of customers (or even would-be-customers) will take part of the hit and the company won't be that unsuccessful.

That's not how it should work.

ESA / Ariana Space did some studies on reusable rockets in the early 200s (if memory serves, and for the love of god I can't find the study anymore...). Their conclusions were:

- technically feasible

- economically not feasible due to limited number of launches

And weather or not i is econommically feasible for SpaceX is impossible to tell without their financials. It does seem so, that Starlink is increasing SpaceX launches.

There is truths to Tesla, but to be honest, Tesla was considerably close to running out of money some while ago. The art of Musk is to have Tesla seen as a tech company, and not as a car maker.

I mean, McDonnell Douglas had a working prototype already in the 90s: https://youtu.be/JzXcTFfV3Ls?t=76

It was barely a prototype, more of a proof of concept, as it couldn't lift anything much but itself. Also it was not just reusable (though not reused) but SSTO. And SSTO is almost certainly a dead end for chemical rockets. In part but not exclusively because aerospikes seem to be impractical, but also because fully reusable and inexpensive boosters are obviously working just fine. The case for sending a lot of deadweight up the gravity well is simply too poor, even if you could do it with great efficiency.

A PooC seems a reasonable moniker, but the sole reason it didn't proceed to anything more practical was the lack of government funding. Big Space had become so dependent on gov contracts that they couldn't envisage doing anything on their own initiative: that was the true innovation of SpaceX, not landing rockets.

Frankly Delta Clipper was even more impressive given that it came from MDC who were by far the most conservative defense contractor. That sort of thing would have been more typical of Northrop.

DC-X's followups didn't get funded because the government and its subcontractors were comfortable with the expendable rockets, at least until Boeing (which bought McD) got frozen out of most government contracts for the EELV program. They were "punished" for corporate espionage by the government giving the contract to the company with the expensive, important parts of the rocket built in Russia.

(BTW, kids, if you ever want to see what a successful act of espionage looks like, look at this: it would look like Boeing shooting off its own foot and then the Pentagon shooting off its own foot in response, both in ways that "accidentally" benefit Russia and make us dependent on them for space access.)

Oh, and a quick non-political followup: Falcon 9 looks like another iteration of DC-X done with dense fuels in mind as per Mitchell Burnside Clapp's papers back in the 90's. I did a quick search but all that turned up was this. [1]

I don't know what this says regarding the possibility of further success for SpaceX; they've moved to a less dense fuel in hopes that it'll allow them to have self pressurizing tankage. While SpaceX has had increadible success I find myself wishing there was a way of wedding Elon's money and drive with the people who built DC-X in hopes that they could maybe, MAYBE, get more than one or two flights out of each test vehicle.

IF you could get cheap RL-10's for the price that the DC-X project was buying them for in the 90's, I'd suggest using them, suitably modified to burn methane, _just_ as a braking/landing engine. [2]

(But that was way back in the 90's, when the MIC was still sometimes running assembly lines instead of building each single engine by hand).

(Oh, and I found a slightly better ref. on RL-10's: [3])

[1] https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/fuels/hydrogen_deltav.html

[2] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=11020.0

[3] https://yarchive.net/space/rocket/rl10.html

So had Spectre in 1967 https://youtu.be/Dnaorqo6krg

Damn, didn't know about that! Impressive thing!

The space launch industry was uniquely dysfunctional; SpaceX could get away with starting near the bottom of the learning curve. Tesla, by contrast, is up against companies that build products at large scales in a thick market while competing against the best the international economy has to offer. There's much less room for error there.

I don't know any other company that offers vertical energy integration just like Tesla. I was just talking yesterday to a guy who loves his Model 3 and is waiting for his Tesla batteries in his house for over a year now (and can pay more if needed). He isn't thinking of using another company, as vertical software integration is more important for him than timing / price.

Yeah, that integrated offering is a great market differentiator. Still a much higher bar than the basic competence that SpaceX has had to display to eat everyone else's lunch.

I think it's generous to attribute reusable rockets to Musk - the Space Shuttle Columbia went on 17 missions - Musk didn't develop the first reusable rocket.

As for electric cars, I believe the limiting factor was battery technology, which has improved in leaps and bounds in the past decade. Tesla wasn't the only company developing electric cars - Renault-Nissan Alliance achieved the sales milestone of 350,000 all-electric vehicles delivered globally in August 2016, ranking second was Tesla Motors with over 139,000 electric cars sold between 2008 and June 2016. It's also not clear that Musk founded Tesla, but I'm not clear on the history there.

Tesla do have the strongest branding in electric cars though, and I would attribute that to Musk's ability as a showman.

Elon Musk certainly DID NOT FOUND TESLA INC. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla inc in 2003. Sorry for the caps, but Musk invested later, after the first prototype (2004). Musk then ousted the original inventors from the company and sued them to for founder status. So, it's interesting that Musk is legally defined now as a founder of a company which he definately never founded.

There is a categorical difference between the Space Shuttle boosters and the Falcon 9 rockets. First of all, the external tank of the space shuttle didn't get reused. The solid rocket boosters were, but only after they were recovered from splash-landing into the ocean, requiring extensive and expensive refurbishing before further launches. Which Falcon 9 boosters largely avoid by landing vertically.

And the Shuttle itself was reusable, but that's sort of besides the point, as that's a space-plane, not a rocket used to bring things into orbit. Whether capsules or space-planes is a better concept for the spacecraft itself is a different discussion altogether.

The per kg cost to orbit of Falcon 9 launches is an order of magnitude less than it was for Space Shuttle, so credit should be given where credit is due.

> First of all, the external tank of the space shuttle didn't get reused.

To be fair, the Falcon 9 similarly discards its entire second stage.

I really wish they'd have boosted the Shuttle tank to stable orbit and used it for space stations.

What would be the use for an external tank in orbit?

It's an enormous, sealed, empty metal tank that they were already taking mostly to orbit already.

One would make a pretty serviceable space station.

100+ would make one hell of a space station if you designed them to be strung together.

Some early NASA concepts: http://www.astronautix.com/s/stsexternaltankstation.html

Cool! Did it contain anything hazardous while in regular use? I'm only seeing liquid H2 and O2. Maybe wall thickness would be a concern for habitation.

I'm not sure what was on the Shuttle tank, but other vehicles carry hydraulic fluid (for engine gimballing) & hydrazine (for small thrusters). They're usually vented at the end of a mission to safe the vehicle.

If you're wondering about practicality, Skylab was a Saturn V tank. Unlike the external tank suggestions, Skylab was built on the ground and never had fuel in it. But it was basically the same structure as the Saturn's third stage. Like ISS, Skylab had some micrometeorite shielding outside of the main tank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab

More recently, Nanoracks has looked at refurbishing ULA's Centaur upper stage into a habitat. Like the Shuttle, Centaur runs on a H2 + O2 cycle. Their plan is to lift an equipment kit onboard the Centaur. They'd cut a hole after the end of the mission and use on-orbit welding (not mature yet) to install all the floors/decks/airlocks.

https://nanoracks.com/in-space-outpost-demonstration/

No nastiness on the Shuttle tank; gimballing and RCS were left up to the Shuttle itself. It's basically just two tanks and some plumbing.

Thanks! I looked at some tank drawings, but couldn't tell if they were omitting auxiliary tanks for simplicity's sake. Didn't want to say anything inaccurate.

Musk did not founded Testa, but was one of the first investors.

And batteries can be attributed to a large degree to Panasonic.