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Comment by elteto | Hacker News Reader

Actually, you are not being pedantic at all. No one in the space industry thought it could be done in a commercially viable way. SpaceX was dismissed time after time by space pundits until it landed a rocket, and then another, and then another. Now the goalpost is 100 reusable flights! I wonder what the next one will be when SpaceX gets to that one.

The article started with a biased premise and then worked to prove that.

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SpaceX executives have stated several times that their company is profitable. But, when SpaceX was trying to do a $750M debt raise just last month, their internal financials were divulged: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-08/musk-said....

It's a company running in the red. Unfortunately EBITDA is still negative (much less earnings). The jury is still out on whether or not SpaceX's approach is in fact commercially viable.

Negative _including_ R&D. If SpaceX was to turn around tomorrow and stop pursuing the Mars goal they would probably be in the black within a year: the Falcon platform is completed, Falcon Heavy already flew and block 5 is optimized for quick reusability. But, SpaceX is dead serious about going to Mars and Musk will use the profits generated from the stable part of the business to fund that objective. That is part of the reason why he says he will not take SpaceX public until it gets to Mars.

I don't think it's true to say that no one thought reuse could be done in a commercially viable way. After all, the entire DC-X program cost about the same as a single F9 launch.

"No one", sure. There were some who thought reuse could be viable. But the "grown ups" in aerospace leadership? Yeah, it's a fair point. The DC-X program was cancelled because the future was the horizontal landing X-33. After that failed, the industry consensus for the "serious" folk was that reuse was a dead end.

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