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Comment by kunai | Hacker News Reader

There needs to be a Godwin's law for how long we can have a thread about space exploration without somebody mentioning SpaceX

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Of course people are going to talk about SpaceX. They're the only ones who have rockets that land. It's because of this that SpaceX launches more mass to orbit than the rest of the world combined. Since last year, the majority of satellites ever launched have been put into orbit by SpaceX.

You might as well suggest a Godwin's law for phone discussion where someone mentions Apple.

> They're the only ones who have rockets that land.

Blue origin also vertically land (and the Shuttle also landed)

Not to take away from Blue origin, but orbital class rocket booster landing is different and much harder than going up, hovering and going down.

One of those is sub orbital still afaik, the other is a beautiful work of engineering but very much retired due to the complexities of the design and is more of a spaceplane than a rocket.

They had to move space down to meet Blue Origins rocket. At least SpaceX can get to orbit.

I can fart very hard and land back on my chair and have achieved about as much as Blue Origin.

Regarding Blue Origin, if you can pad the margins of your vehicles heavily because you don't need to reach orbit, then it's a lot easier to make a vehicle reusable. This is why Scaled Composites could relatively easily throw together a vehicle that could perform this back in 2004.

NASA and the DoD had orbital programs (Delta Clipper) vertically landing rockets back in the early 1990s.[1] Funding shortfalls eventually killed the program before it could reach its potential.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

Not quite. SpaceX is willing to be push the limits of cash incineration where others are not, and that explains all of their progress. They boldly go where no-one has gone before, raising $10B so far and looking to raise more as we speak. This is standard operating procedure for Musk companies; burn cash to attempt to boil the ocean, then brag brag brag about how far ahead they are.

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