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Comment by elteto | Hacker News Reader

I remember a long time ago I watched an interview with a high-level ESA French official that derided SpaceX’s efforts on reusability. It was back when SpaceX was still trying to figure out how to “land” boosters on the open sea. I remember the smug and superior attitude of the guy, he was just shy of calling SpaceX a fraud. Fast forward to today and here we are. I would love to see what he has to say now.

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Im pretty sure this guy claimed SpaceX cheated because the govt funded them when they were trying to rev up for the COTS program.

I wonder what he thinks about the Ariane 6 funding structure.

Lots of different ESA and Arianespace made lots of arrogant and wrong statements over the years, trust me as somebody that has followed it.

Their claims about illegal subsidies were always utterly hilarious. It was literally just them appealing to European nationalism without any evidence. They were basically saying to convince clueless ESA member-state politicians of nonsense. There is a reason they haven't even tried to bring this to the WTO, they knew they were full of shit.

A bit like the infamous interview of Steve Ballmer (along with Mike Zafirovski) on the iPhone launch ("it doesn't have a keyboard!")...

I mean, Ballmer was kind of right about that, for business use. As soon as someone wants to reply to an email now they pull out their laptop. What he didn’t realise is that pulling out your laptop is easy enough that you can lose the keyboard on the phone. But it did mean that the smart phone did indeed fail in the way that he expected, in that the business market that windows was serving at the time did not end up using their iPhone for business tasks. In fact people clung to their blackberries for years for that reason, even after the iPhone became an undeniable hit. The iPhone never became a significant business machine for text. Of course he also did not realise that an entire new consumer market would appear for smart phones too, but if you look back it’s not clear that apple did either. They still pushed a somewhat business angle, not a “literally everyone” angle

He was panicking in that interview though for sure, but I think people give him more crap for it than they should

Surely a swiping keyboard is faster than the "array of tiny keys" approach. It's a much lighter touch.

Have you used those tiny keyboards? They were quite amazing

The T9s were... I'm happy that they disappeared. The qwertys were not bad. I'm swiping on my phone to the amazement of my friends that were never able to learn to do it. That beats tapping keys. However a physical qwerty was better than tapping on a qwerty displayed on a touchscreen. Unfortunately it takes 1/3 or 1/2 of the phone and it's there even when it's not needed.

And that's this narrow view that perhaps made incumbents missed the big picture.

I think the real insight Apple had is that, with phones becoming smartphone, internet, videos, apps, etc people would want a bigger screen rather than a keyboard and a smaller screen even if a physical keyboard might be a bit better to type (and I'm not even sure of that).

A radical idea proved a winner. A bit like with SpaceX...

I fully expect Arianespace to be like Nokia was, very slow, a lot of bureaucracy, and no-one dreaming of anything really new. The irony is that since they launch from the coast of French Guyana reusable boosters that can land on sea platforms sound like the perfect solution for them...

He was very smug and he was proved totally wrong. No phone has a keyboard now, including for business and taking into account that people type even more than when they had Blackberry's "email machines"... he was also wrong about the iPhone's pricing and the rest is, well, history: Blackberry, Nokia, and Microsoft were destroyed.

It's the same logic with SpaceX: a newcomer is doing something new so obviously they don't know anything and will fail... until they destroy all the incumbents. It's always the same process.

Well they type on their laptops mainly

I don't know what world you're living in where people are avoiding typing on their phones. I feel like I see this observation sometimes from people who don't like smartphone keyboards, as if because you're bad at typing on them, so must everyone else be. But look around next time you're at a bar, on a subway, waiting in line somewhere. People type a lot on their phones. And they're really fast at it.

Fast yeah. Faster than me on my PC? No way :)

I do far more business email and chat on my iPhone than I ever did on my Blackberry. I think you are being overly charitable to the point of redefining history.

Landing still requires a lot of fuel, which needs fuel to be carried up. It was a waste and still is.

If they come up with reusable fished from the ocean, that'd be useful.

Nobody cares if some performance is lost when you are good enough for 99% of payloads and you save tons of money by retrieving the expensive part of the rocket

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. It doesn’t require a “lot” of fuel. It depends on the mission profile.

And guess what you can do? Run 9 LEO missions with the same booster and throw it away on the 10th with a GEO mission. That’s freaking incredible.

A booster just completed its 18th flight last week. 18 flights within 3 years. They’ve raised the limit for Starlink launches to 20 reuses.

It also takes extra fuel to land an airplane. Does it make sense to just throw the whole plane away after one use to save the extra landing fuel?

This comparison would make sense if planes were leaving orbit.

I would love to hear an explanation as to why that makes a difference?

Planes work by heating up air and then going fast enough to fly? While rockets have to eject stuff and move the centre of mass outside of themselves.

Also they need to leave the gravity well while planes don't do that?

It's completely different.

Cost of refurbishing a booster fished from the ocean would dwarf the fuel cost and lost capacity. Not to mention the extra weight and cost you'd incur building a booster that can impact the ocean at speed.

They have to land a nearly empty booster. They don't need as much fuel as they needed to launch. Anyway, here are the economics according to Musk

https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-elon-musk-falcon-9...

The breakeven is closer to 2 launches than to 3, so 3.

Fished from the ocean... ok...

Do you think you can fall from space and hit the ocean and be reusable? To land in the water and not spatter yourself you'll need to be going less than 20 miles per hour, which is a hell of a lot less then the 1000+MPH a rocket booster is going, and second stage would turn to plasma if it didn't slow down first.

> Landing still requires a lot of fuel, which needs fuel to be carried up.

That's true, and that reduces the payload of the returning stage. To have it working, you either have to reduce the payload or to increase the size of the stage. In both cases the payload weight to liftoff weight decreases.

> It was a waste and still is.

That's false, as in exchange the operator gets the stage back to be reused on the next flight. That's usually a huge saving in costs. Fuel is relatively cheap, and to make a rocket somewhat bigger or a payload somewhat smaller does relatively small change to the price of a kilogram to LEO comparing to the opportunity not to pay for the stage hardware on the next flight.

Overall SpaceX made a huge improvement in costs and moved the world launch industry quite a bit forward.

I agree with the other commenters about this being incorrect, but there is in hindsight an even bigger deal -- getting to examine the rocket (not fished out of salt water) after the flight and learn from that is huge and often overlooked.

AND run to failure.

If a booster can survive 20 launches, it probably has most of the gotchas for launch #1 ironed out.

At worst you can still operate the vehicle the same way you would a conventional rocket, so it's strictly better in that sense. For every mission in which the cost of bringing the rocket back is lower than the cost of manufacturing a new one, you come out ahead.

That sort of thing re-reinforces my believe that Musk it's some genius it's that managers like that French guy are blocking progress and creating negative value. Where Musk is usually too nutty and ADD to get the way for long.

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