apparently the hard part is getting the control systems and landing legs simultaneously lightweight enough and reliable enough, if i correctly understand spacex's long history of failing to land rockets (which i may not, since all i know is a small sample of what they've published)

agreed about dragon. those fuckers do orbit!

The hard part for landing a suborbital rocket vertically is that. The hard part of landing anything from orbit is still definitely the re-entry.

oh, sorry, you're right. a few rocks do survive re-entry every day without the benefit of any engineering at all, but they have a very, very low success rate