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There seems to be a strong anti-Tesla campaign afoot. I'm not surprised given that the entire auto industry wants them to fail and a significant portion of the auto industry (and unions, etc.) want EVs to fail in general.

Tesla seems to be having some severe growing pains, but I have learned not to count Elon or any of his ventures out. Self-landing reusable rockets were impossible too according to pretty much the entire aerospace industry. If it comes down to it Tesla could still raise quite a bit of money almost overnight, albeit probably with more dilution than they would prefer. I have little doubt that they will eventually scale up. Question is how much blood they will have to spill in the form of liquidity and market cap before they get there.

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> Self-landing reusable rockets were impossible too according to pretty much the entire aerospace industry.

Only if they have forgotten the DC-X, which I doubt they have done.

of course the dc-x was yet another different flight vehicle that wasn't given enough time to be successful. and it was a bit different in that there wasn't a separate capsule from the launch rocket. if musk had his passionate engineering self behind it he could have made it work.

> Self-landing reusable rockets were impossible too according to pretty much the entire aerospace industry.

I guess they didn't ask the people who designed and built the Apollo lunar landing modules in the 1960s?

There is an implicit "on earth". Gravity wells being vastly different. If the earth was bigger then we wouldn't even be able to get to orbit.

Wouldn't we just need to generate more velocity?

Easier said than done. Rockets have to carry their own fuel, so they are heaviest at launch. If you’re in a deeper gravity well, then you need a longer burn to reach escape velocity, and then also more thrust at launch because you have to carry more fuel (which means still more fuel...)

It never becomes mathematically impossible to achieve escape, but it can become engineering-impossible, ie the propellant fraction becomes so high that it’s impossible to build a structure that can contain the propellant and maintain mechanical stability. Just for reference, modern rockets are 90+ percent propellant by mass.

For more, see https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...

The lunar module was neither self-landing nor reusable.

The lunar module was navigated and landed by a human pilot (with computer assistance).

The descent stage stayed on the Moon, and wasn't reused (except as a launch platform for the ascent stage). The ascent stage also wasn't reused - after the astronauts exited from the ascent stage into the command module, the ascent stage was jettisoned to crash into the lunar surface (or sent into solar orbit). Only the command module returned to Earth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module

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