Well you seem to be assuming that fuel is the only real cost to go to space. Our current system would be like if every time we took a flight to Europe, they threw away the plane afterwards.
Rockets are not cheap (in the neighborhood of $100 million), and if we could get to a point where the only cost to go to space was fuel, that would be a huge improvement.
“I don’t dispute the technology is impressive. But the tech is not his.”
Then who's is it? As far as I can tell, no one in the history of space travel has been able to land a rocket on its feet.
Besides these up and down tests that I already linked to, they have already started to attempt to land actual mission rockets (after placing the ISS resupply module in orbit) once they come back down over the ocean. They are currently building a new ocean platform and the next ISS resupply launch is in about six weeks. Musk says that they think they have a 50/50 chance of sticking the landing on this next launch.
So maybe we can continue this discussion of whether or not this idea is “fanciful” and “impractical” in six weeks.
McDonnell Douglas' Landable Rocket About to Be Mothballed : Aerospace: Despite successful tests, the Defense Department's funding for the project is running out.We'll see what we'll see...
January 27, 1994It was a spectacle right out of Buck Rogers.
A 42-foot-tall, 21-ton, cone-shaped rocket lifted 150 feet above the New Mexico desert, stopped, moved sideways 350 feet, stopped again, then floated back to Earth, landing tail-first on its four pods as smoke and flames poured from its engines .
Never had anyone seen such a vertical landing by a rocket, except in science-fiction movies. And despite lasting only 60 seconds, the maiden voyage last August of the unmanned Delta Clipper-Experimental (DC-X) generated waves of publicity.
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Champions of the DC-X believe it would be a cheap, reusable and dependable space launch vehicle that would not need to toss away expensive boosters and other hardware and could be quickly refurbished and launched again.
Hatched by the Pentagon as part of its "Star Wars" defense program, the DC-X is also an ideal prototype for a rocket that could launch commercial payloads for far less money than either the Space Shuttle or existing unmanned rockets, proponents say. In that role, it could bolster the United States' role in the increasingly crowded space launch business.
Well you seem to be assuming that fuel is the only real cost to go to space.
Fuel is weight. When they launch a rocket with chemical propellant placing a 5+ ton payload in LEO (plus fuel & rocket) and land it vertically, I'll eat my hat. It's been over 20 years...IMHO 'fanciful' is apropos. "Bridge to nowhere" comes to mind...