Mars is completely off topic, as they didn't land the booster there. We had Space Shuttle before and it didn't say much about landing rocket boosters.
Didn't Apollo 11 land on the moon using a rocket, then take off from the moon again, back in the 1960s?
Not exactly a tech demo. And the Apollo missions had the additional challenges of being crewed, and targeting an atmosphere and gravity they couldn't reproduce on earth for test purposes.
The SpaceX stuff is neat though, compared to the defence industry clowns they're competing with.
To do what Apollo 11 did without discarding the boosters you also need orbital refueling and probably rapid turnaround (or a huge inventory of boosters), which SpaceX plans to develop next. Awesome stuff.
You know, this bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module that descended to the moon, landed, some guys walked out and grabbed some moon rocks, then they took off again and made it back to earth.
That's a rocket-propelled space vehicle gently landing tail first, and ready for immediately reuse.
Given that it clearly had been done, I doubt anyone who knew what they were talking about was telling Musk it couldn't be done.
> All engineers and other professionals told him that landing rockets is bullshit
Where did you hear that?
Even if that's true, there's still every engineer and every other professional in the world you haven't spoken with. To take an example, I'm an engineer, I didn't say it. That disproves the claim.
That seems less impressive than saying 100%, doesn't it? But hey, this is hacker news, not a math exam, and 100% is pretty much < 0.00001%, lol.
Also the head of ULA said they'd need to do 10 rides of a booster before it makes financial sense to reuse. SpaceX claims it's one
What didn't happen? I didn't provide you a narrative, I gave 2 examples of uncrewed propulsive landing which literally happened.
> There is an incredible gap between the tech demo you're speaking about, and actually landing a heavy orbital rocket, and then doing it 100 times in a row without a hiccup.
I agree. Now please point to me which part of the self-landing booster Elon built.
He built the company that built the booster, which to me is at least as interesting as building the booster itself.
It's not just about money - Bezos has much more money available than SpaceX had in 2002-2015, and yet his rockets still don't land.
I do agree though that SpaceX has used their money much more efficiently and moved a lot faster in general than BO.