[throw5959]

Sorry but no, this is absolutely not what happened. I am watching it closely ever since SpaceX was founded in 2002. There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about, and actually landing a heavy orbital rocket, and then doing it 100 times in a row without a hiccup.

Mars is completely off topic, as they didn't land the booster there. We had Space Shuttle before and it didn't say much about landing rocket boosters.

[michaelt]

> There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about,

Didn't Apollo 11 land on the moon using a rocket, then take off from the moon again, back in the 1960s?

Not exactly a tech demo. And the Apollo missions had the additional challenges of being crewed, and targeting an atmosphere and gravity they couldn't reproduce on earth for test purposes.

The SpaceX stuff is neat though, compared to the defence industry clowns they're competing with.

[throw5959]

Apollo 11 had a three stage rocket and every stage was discarded. SpaceX is obviously not the first company to land something - but landing a rocket booster that just performed an orbital lift is the interesting and extremely hard thing to do. The payload can be entirely designed to land - but the booster has many other constraints (payload weight and its desired velocity and trajectory being some of them).

To do what Apollo 11 did without discarding the boosters you also need orbital refueling and probably rapid turnaround (or a huge inventory of boosters), which SpaceX plans to develop next. Awesome stuff.

[AnimalMuppet]

Apollo 11 was crewed, though.

[ImPostingOnHN]

I think it is? Like, this sounds like a pretty silly claim:

> All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit

Where did you hear that?

[Yizahi]

Arianespace director literally laughed in public over that idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W676Kk9LSYw

[throw5959]

Well I heard it myself from practically anybody up until 2015. I even attended quite a lot of conference talks on this topic... I'm sure it's not hard to find it online, famously a NASA director (I think?) did so.

[wormlord]

> Sorry but no, this is absolutely not what happened

What didn't happen? I didn't provide you a narrative, I gave 2 examples of uncrewed propulsive landing which literally happened.

> There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about, and actually landing a heavy orbital rocket, and then doing it 100 times in a row without a hiccup.

I agree. Now please point to me which part of the self-landing booster Elon built.

[throw5959]

I told you what didn't happen - the situation wasn't as clear as you say. Everybody in the space industry was absolutely sure he is totally crazy and it's impossible to do with an entire first/second stage rocket booster.

He built the company that built the booster, which to me is at least as interesting as building the booster itself.

It's not just about money - Bezos has much more money available than SpaceX had in 2002-2015, and yet his rockets still don't land.