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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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ofc you're going to get ignoramuses going "elon invented that!" who cares, china perfects it, makes it safe, and uses it to benefit the people.
When we alter the history books we'll make sure any contributions involving him or any of the other ham sandwiches gets scrubbed don't worry.
I really hesitate saying shoulders of giants here. I really do. Let's just go with use his company's research.
he didn't invent the net. and honestly, is a rocket motor with landing legs a new idea? the apollo lander used that, and how long before someone found out how useful reusable rockets could be?
Also it's been conceptualized in science fiction for like 100 years.
It was the original concept of rockets. Of course people conceptualized them as reusable...how else would you get back. They didn't start becoming disposable until Von Braun and NASA used space exploration as a vessel to get PR points for developing ICBMs which are never supposed to be used again.
Amateur shit, if I was a rocket scientist I would've invented reusable ICBMs.
In fairness to 1960s NASA, the computer technology needed for landing big rockets back on Earth just didn't exist yet. Disposable rockets were unavoidable. It hasn't been until the last 15 years or so that computers got small and powerful enough to be capable of controlling autonomous vertical landings and still fit onboard.
One of the early concepts for the space shuttle got around this problem by having flight crew on both the booster and the orbiter, and making them both spaceplanes.
In this concept, after the orbiter detaches and continues the mission to space, the booster spaceplane is piloted manually in a glide for a runway landing just like the real-life space shuttle was.
There's other factors like engines not being able to throttle down far enough with stable thrust for a vertical landing, aka "deep throttling". Main rocket engines of the Apollo era just couldn't do it, they pretty much ran at 100% thrust at all times, and that's way too high for a vertical landing. Engine R&D was barely advanced enough to simply stop engines from exploding. Even today it's hard to build an engine that's powerful, fuel-efficient, and also capable of deep throttling. Usually it's a "pick two" situation.
The original pre-cuts STS program would have really been something. But once Apollo "won the race" there was no more governmental will in the US to do space research and infrastructure in a more than token way.
The Falcon 9 isn't actually throttling that deep either, it's just lighting a smaller number of engines for the same effect. 3/9 for the boostback, 1/9 for the final landing. But of course running a large number of engines at once presents its own set of problems, as seen in the N1. Falcon Heavy getting 27 rocket engines to work together is another of those legitimately impressive things you do have to hand it to the workers at SpaceX for.
The practical limitations all make sense. It's not like there was really an option, but the development of deep throttling engines and reusable boosters was definitely not helped by the majority of funding going to getting spy satellites in orbit and ICBM development.
If the goal really was actually space exploration and not warfare/spycraft, we would have likely had some form of reusable rocket way sooner. We just had all these excess rockets laying around that were meant to carry a 2000lb warhead that could also carry 2000lbs worth of dudes.