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Old May 13th 21, 07:58 AM posted to sci.space.policy
snidely
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Default B1051 flies, and is recovered, for the 10th time

Just this Wednesday, JF Mezei puzzled about:
On 2021-05-11 22:28, David Spain wrote:

Until SpaceX came along, Old Space companies were more than happy to let
NASA and the USAF and to a lesser extent, DARPA determine what the goals
and objectives of their rocket programs should be.


In fairness, when the customer specifies "new only" it really removes
incentive to develop re-usable since what will you re-use your used
rockets for?

Recall that NASA initial required "new only".

The self motivation you mentions )and I agree) is that SpaceX also has
aims to be its own customer (eg Starlink). So it did have a use for
used rockets for its own playground in space.

And once it proved itself, then NASA and commercial customers did turn
around and start to buy launches on re-uised falcon 9. (and NASA on
Dragon 2).

I would hope that ULA and ESA have had skunkworks to design re-usable
rocket because now that SpaceX has proven it can be done, it is but a
matter of time before the other guys lose a lot of business, leaving
only lobby-driver government purchases where the RFP specifies
performance that Falcon9 can't achieve to justify sending the business
to ULA.


ULA has promised that they will recover their first stage engines from
Vulcan "eventually".

Meanwhile, RocketLabs is on the doorstep of recovering Electron first
stages (they've done a wet pickup of one already). Blue Origin is
clearly serious about re-use, although New Glenn is seriously delayed b
trying to take Giant Steps (per Eric Berger in an NSF interview).

/dps

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