>Carmack made reusable, vertically landing rockets before SpaceX did, albeit on a much smaller scale.

No, he didn't, or perhaps more generously "much smaller scale" is doing a LOT of work in your sentence. The core challenge of real rockets is all about scale/speed, and in particular getting to orbit which is where the vast majority of the value starts. The Rocket Equation and material science makes that a completely different scale of challenge to do at all, let alone with a sufficiently useful mass fraction, let alone with reuse, vs anything suborbital. Neither Armadillo nor the DC-X were going to orbit. Hobbies are neat but going from that to something real represents a huge huge amount of work and skill.

> No, he didn't

His co-founder at Oculus, Palmer Luckey, talked about how he did on the Arthi and Sriram podcast (both hosts with considerable big tech experience and VCs at A16Z). He said the company was

> "very successful, probably the most successful (rocket) company in its time in it's budget range. They were doing better things than companies spending 100x more money. They moved very fast, building a vertical take-off and landing rocket, actually long before SpaceX did."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMhVrYhQUsk&t=1100s

They also went out of business, which seems like a reasonable characterization of something that failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armadillo_Aerospace

If profit is your sole motivator and guide then you may not be fit for a discussion about rockets.

The profit motive has proved, over and over, to be a more effective motivator than anything else, including getting whipped and/or shot for failure.

I remember an earthquake in LA caused a freeway interchange to collapse. The government offered an incentive of something like a million bucks for every day the rebuild was completed ahead of schedule. The contractor got it done in a stupendously short time.

Yes: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02ramp.html

Which is still something that CA sometimes does, with apparently good results: https://www.ktvu.com/news/california-contractor-earns-8m-bon...

>The profit motive has proved, over and over, to be a more effective motivator than anything else.

The USSR and it's space program would argue differently.

How so? NASA wasn't motivated by the profit motive in the 1960s, either. And SpaceX has completely trounced NASA and the Russians in rocket technology.

It is what is driving spacex. They also embrace failure. It is where they learn what went wrong and fix it. At one point they were 4 rockets away from going out of business. I think they got down to the last 1 or 2 and they worked and spacex got to stay around and do cool stuff. Without money that company would not exist. They are now forcing the whole industry to re-think what it means to fire a rocket off. They have shifted everyone into thinking reuse is the best way forward. Where as before everything was mostly a one off special one time build. That profit is what is making them sustainable instead of the whims of some senator from whatever state decides to spike your program in favor of his buddies program.

If you can't even break even then your entire venture stops. Stopping development and launches is by definition failure. This seems pretty obvious.

I am also not launching rockets. It seems like I am launching exactly as many rockets as Carmack, thus by simple math I am just as successful/good at launching rockets at Carmack.

DC-X predates Carmack and SpaceX both. The actual challenge is to produce an economically viable product that can survive beyond grants and investors. This is important, as it determines whether the system continues to operate or not. Falcon 9, and not the DC-X, flies today.

I think doing it with booster capable of actually putting things into orbit must be a challenging aspect of the problem too. DC-X and Carmack weren't doing this part.