In article ,
says...

On Wednesday, October 2, 2013 5:14:33 AM UTC-7, Jeff Findley wrote:
Musk isn't trying to make Dragon and Falcon 9 "just as good" as other

existing, and upcoming, launch vehicles and spacecraft. Musk is trying

to leapfrog them both in terms of cost and in terms of capabilities.

Yes, he's going to do stuff far beyond what's been done before.
Make economic, reusable rockets.

This is a relatively short term goal being pursued while flying
otherwise expendable Falcon 9 launch vehicles. In relative terms, it's
not costing him much to try and his engineers are learning every time
they try.

Establish a dot com billionaire retirement community on Mars.

This is a long term goal which will never happen unless the goal of
creating an affordable, reusable, launch vehicle is achieved. Sure this
goal is "way out there", but Musk is only in his early 40's, so he still
has several decades to pursue this goal if he wants to see it achieved
during his lifetime.

And to demonstrate he's well on his way, what do his fan boys cite?

He delivered a satellite to orbit.

Not a small feat for a start-up. Over the years, many start-ups have
failed miserably when they attempted the same. Even the ones that
eventually succeeded (e.g. Orbital with Pegasus) had their share of
failures along the way. When you consider how (relatively) little money
Musk has spent in pursuit of this goal, it's doubly impressive.

He delivered supplies to the I.S.S. and brought them back.

Excepting the, hideously expensive, space shuttle, returning cargo from
ISS to earth is a feat that no other US vehicle has done to date.
Excepting the pitifully small payloads returned by Russian vehicles,
none of the "international partners" have any earth return capability
either.

Newflash: that's been done before.

But not at the relatively small funding level SpaceX had available to
them. In the past, much of what has "been done before" has been done by
large governments handing out huge "cost-plus" contracts.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer