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Comment by bobl | Hacker News Reader

I doesn't seem clear at this point whether re-usable will be significant for activities beyond earth orbit. Partly the excitement comes from being a workaround for humanities reluctance to spend money on space exploration. Believe what you want, but from what I can find this doesn't seem to be a significant part of what would e.g. make humanity interplanetary. At least not yet.

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Getting to orbit is hard, for anything big beyond earth orbit, we'll probably need manufacturing or at least some assembly in orbit. That takes a lot of trips from earth to orbit. Making that more efficient means more resources left for the real exploration.

I dunno if I really follow your logic here. It would be nice if nobody cared about money and we all just worked hard to make everything awesome or whatever. But, we (sadly) don't live in that world. So in this world that we do live in, bringing down the cost of getting things/people from the ground to really really high up in the sky can only be viewed as a step towards becoming multiplanetary.

>I doesn't seem clear at this point whether re-usable will be significant for activities beyond earth orbit.

beside everything else, getting retro-rockets work well at hypersonic speeds is a key to landing on Mars (I really loved the de-facto SpaceX propaganda series "Mars". Even better than "Martian" for me. The only slight disappointment is the cop out at the very end).

My great grandmother was reading a pulp magazine about man going to the moon when she was young, her father made a point to check that she understood that such things were impossible if not extremely far off in the future. The only reason I know this story is that she survived to watch the moon landings and told my father, who told me. The moral of the story was always that it's very hard to predict technological growth, in particular, we tend to undershoot with our long term predictions. Personally I tend to be more weary of people that claim something won't happen in my lifetime than people that tell me something will happen.

Did you notice NASA's RFP for a reusable lunar lander?

Did you notice ULA's reusable/refuelable ACES is aimed squarely at BEO?

And if SpaceX and Blue Origin bid for the 2 LOP-G resupply flights, they'll bid reusable launchers and claim significant cost savings.

Sounds like everyone has reusable stuff in their plans. Believe what you want!

I named 4 different organizations that think that reusability is important beyond earth orbit.

Also, saying "If you don't want to see that point I can't really help that" is not going to result in a good conversation.

If you want to get back from Mars you need a reusable rocket.

By that definition, the Apollo program had reusable rockets. (Able to climb back out of a gravity well, leave orbit of a large mass, and return to earth).

Escape velocity of Mars is less than half Earth's or about double the moon's.

Overcoming blockers is always significant.

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