Not really. Falcon 9 is more sophisticated than it looks at first glance. Merlin has extremely high performance when compared to earlier gas generators... it has a t/w of 200 compared to the ra-27s 100 or the f-1s 95. The alluminum lithium alloys that give the rocket such a low dry mass date from the 90s. The avionics in falcon are revolutionary, and couldn’t have been possible before the early 2000s... a lot of little things like that.

That's why I said "evolving". Making engines better, introducing FSW when it was introduced, and so on. The F9-like boosters that could have been made around 1972 would still have been much better than the shuttle turned out to be.

What one should object to in this scenario is the idea that the conventional aerospace companies, and NASA, would have done anything like this, when their internal incentive structures pushed them away from it.

We did build an f-9 like booster around the time of the shuttle, the delta ii. It doesn’t compare to falcon. Neither does Antares, built at the same time as the f-9

Delta-II was not a F9-class launcher. The first stage thrust (ignoring strapons, which one should because F9 doesn't use them) was less than 1/7th that of the F9. A closer match was the Saturn IB.

Delta ii was designed around boosters! Also when falcon 9 was developed its target payload was ten tons to Leo, similar to delta ii’s 8

F9 1.0's payload to LEO was 11.5 tons, vs. (up to) 6.8 tons for Delta II.

Yes, D9 was designed around boosters. This means D9 is a different kind of design than F9. I'm contending that a more F9-like design, like Saturn 1B, could have evolved into something like the F9 over time. D-II could not have.

DII, not D9

> Something very much like an expendable F9 could have been made decades ago.

We've made non-reusable rockets for quite some time pre-F9.