I don’t dispute the technology is impressive. But the tech is not his.
Rockets landing on earth is a fanciful idea, but completely impractical, save for draining meager resources away from other valid scientific endeavors. Until a non-chemical method of reaching orbit is attained, we are limited to simple math: What goes up, must come down and takes a given quantity of fuel to lift a given quantity of mass.
Musk started out well enough but then degraded into the typical liberal that sucks at the government teat.
It’s time he (and all the other BS grant-suckers) was cut off and science/research dollars redirected back to a reinvigorated NASA (though I understand that that will never happen with current leadership...rather, lack thereof). Perhaps a new generation of scientific minds at NASA, with the old generation gone, can restore this country back to a respectable pillar of scientific achievement.
.02
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.