How old are you?
Do you use a cell phone? Ever use GPS..? Have you ever relied on a weather forecast..? I won't ask if you use the internet, because I SEE that you do.
How many times have you heard, "We cancelled the countdown, owing to bad weather."...?
They FLY to good weather, then launch.
This is totally fantastic; I hope they can combine it with Musk's re-landing system.
I’m 43, I’m former infantry. I have three tours overseas. I’ve seen technology and what it can do. I can also use map and compass and go without a phone like I used to. The trouble is all this technology and means allow those that would want to control us all to be able to do so a lot easier than without.
All these same conveniences which allow you to talk to your car or Alexa, or anything makes it far easier to bring you and yours under their thumb.
I admit to having an impulse to think the same - but in reality, Musk’s landing rocket is the first stage of the rocket - and the intent of this aircraft is to replace the first stage booster rocket.Musk relands the first stage rocket, Scaled Composites recovers the first stage which isn’t a rocket but a turbojet aircraft.
If you think about it, relanding the second stage would pretty much require putting in orbit enough rocket to have launched the payload from the ground to orbit. Utterly impractical. Unless you use the Shuttle approach, and use aerodynamic friction rather than rocket propulsion to accomplish the deceleration.
What could be considered (but, I doubt not, rejected) would be a second stage powered by ramjet engines, possibly winged and relandable - and a third stage rocket to outer space. Were such a second stage practical, it would presumably accelerate the payload from high subsonic to, say, Mach 2.5. Higher if you want to spring for titanium.
But ramjets would be pretty worthless for landing approach, so recovery would be similar to landing a Shuttle.