Vertical Landing Rockets Before SpaceX

You are making some really silly assumptions that are common amongst laymen in spaceflight. > They are utterly crushing all competition in terms of price and launch cadence. Launch market is not the entirety of the spaceflight industry. "The share of launch vehicles is as small as 4 percent of the overall market of space services." - Dmitry Rogozin And Blue Origin can do propulsive landing like SpaceX: link Propulsive landing has been around for a while: this video Whilst it seems (and is!) very cool to see the boosters land, it seems to impress the laymen a lot more than the true technical worth of the feat. Here's an addon to the Orbiter spaceflight simulator with recoverable falcon 9 stages: link More or less requires college level kinematics at the core of the control/guidance. Also with the recent DM-2 anomaly, SpaceX is playing catch up with Blue Origin, not the other way round.

> If it were that easy, it would have happened. This idea of automatic progress is one of the great fallacies of our time. Things don't get done unless action is taken. Progress is volitional and requires effort whether it's at the scale of a single individual or an entire global economy. If action is not taken the status quo prevails by inertia. It might be cliche but I have to cite SpaceX and their reusable rocket cores as a classic example. Here is a video of a VTVL rocket called the DC-X created and flown in the early-mid 1990s: this video We could have had reusable rockets by 2000, but unfortunately the project was cancelled. Instead we endured another 10 years of paper studies supposedly "proving" that reusable rockets couldn't be economical. These studies were funded and produced by people with a financial vested interest in disposable rockets. Nuclear and renewable energy absolutely can replace fossil fuels. There is no physical reason this can't happen and with scale they could be cost competitive or perhaps even cheaper. It's not happening because nobody is pushing it hard enough to overcome the inertia of vested interests and... well... plain old inertia. Edit: another way of thinking of this kind of thing is the common "has anyone called the police?" scenario. Imagine someone gets shot on the street. A crowd of people gathers around. Nobody does anything because surely someone has called the police, so the victim dies waiting for help.