The list is longer than that! The earliest hop was probably by McDonnell Douglas in 1993 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_QQDY7PYc8
Deep Blue, several km, hard landing — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-g26Zt15lo
iSpace, 0.3 km — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKCH9ElmmZA
CASC, 12 km — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55iVjGuf_sE (their 75 km attempt in January failed, and doesn't have a public video)
Space Epoch, 2.5 km, hard landing — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTQK1kDpbw4
This is the "markets mature and commodify over time" thing.
What companies are supposed to do in those cases are one of two things. One, keep investing the money into the market or related ones so you keep having an advantage. Or two, if there is nothing relevant and adjacent to productively invest in, return it to shareholders as dividends or share buybacks so they can invest it in some other unrelated market.
But space seems like it would be the first one big time because of the amount of stuff that still has yet to be developed. Starlink was an obvious example of something in that nature, and then it's going to be things like "put datacenters in orbit so you can use solar without worrying about clouds or nighttime" and "build robots that can do semi-autonomous work in places far enough away for both human presence and round trip latency to be an inconvenience" etc.
We'd be living in Star Trek by the time they'd run out of something more to do.
Chances are that we will be living on the consequence of the end of fossil fuels and the rise of climate change long before that, though.
Not remotely the worst case. How do you expect to power all the ships needed for globalisation with nuclear power? What about planes? Can a rocket take off with a nuclear engine?
Fossil fuels account for 80% of the energy we use, electricity merely 20%. A whole lot of those 80% come from use-cases that were built around fossil fuels (how do you make plastic and all the materials that depend on it with nuclear energy?), and we don't (yet) have a way to replace that with something else. Try to power a ship with electricity...
Hydrogen, you say? We would need a lot more energy to produce enough hydrogen to replace oil. So we're going from "we don't have a way to compensate for the lack of oil" with "our solution is to not only compensate, but actually produce more energy than what oil was giving us".
All that while currently living a mass extinction and having already missed the reasonable objectives for global warming. So we have a few decades to get there, and what we have seen in the last few decades is that all we have achieved is making the problem worse.
If you have enough electricity, you can manufacture avgas, methane and whatever other fuels you need for aerospace.
I also won't forget the marketing department at the camera company I worked at, dismissing the iPhone, when it first came out (it ended up eating their lunch).
RIM got so completely smoked with their ten year development cycles. It’s amazing if that they still have a business today to be honest.
They are so far ahead even their biggest competitor can’t comprehend what they’re doing.
There's also an entertaining movie based on this book, a rare business film that is more about failure than success.
At the time, data was mondo expensive. Everyone was stuck low-bandwidth. Then when the iphone launched, Jobs + Apple did an exclusive with Cingular/AT&T. The talk at the time, was it was a bidding war -- they all wanted the iphone on their network first.
That exclusive opened the door to a phone manufacturer, for the first time, negotiating bandwidth, new data plans and more. RIM didn't have a lot of software that was high bandwidth, because the carriers wouldn't even allow it before Apple broke that hold.
So suddenly here's this new phone, with an exclusive, and with actual usable web browsing with a usable data plan price.... and RIM still begging for that.
(Obviously RIM still could have caught up if they didn't drop the ball, but this was a big shift in the market)
>once you demonstrate that something is doable (as SpaceX has) It opens the way for other capital to create competitive systems.
>buy launch services from another vendor... without the baggage of the damage Elon has done
Can anyone point to a single launch contract cancelled because of "baggage?" Big media would no doubt gleefully shout that story from the hilltops, but I haven't seen it.
>it feels almost prophetic to watch SpaceX's competitors emerge.
All Goliaths eventually fall, but they have an annoying tendency of not doing so on the timelines we might hope for. Just look at Microsoft in the 90s.
Honda is still in the jet industry, despite joining late. The Honda Jet was a fresh take on what small jet design. Moving into new, adjacent markets is their schtick. Motorcycles -> passenger vehicles -> jets -> rockets
"The smart cow problem is the idea that a technically difficult task may only need to be solved once, by one person, for less technically proficient group members to accomplish the task using an easily repeatable method. "
The challenge with orbital booster reuse is getting them threw the atmosphere intact and ready to land and then be reused quickly. And do that while being optimized enough to carry payload. That is the actual challenge. And that's just the first, then you need to build everything to be able to do this 5-10 times.
Only one other company then SpaceX has achieved getting a booster back at all, and that was by dropping it into an ocean. RocketLab, and they so far as I know have never reflown a complete booster. BlueOrigin has never landed a complete booster. ULA and Arianespace aren't close.
Honda in particular is not a launch competitor and is very unlikely to be one in the future. Japan already has a pet rocket that they support that has low launch rates. Honda isn't just isn't a competitor in the launch sector, and I don't think they are even planning that.
BlueOrigin might emerge as a competitor, but its nothing like Sun (sun was profitable in the first year). BlueOrigin simply has an infinite money glitch, that almost no other company in history had. The amount of money BlueOrigin spent in the last 10 year is actually unbelievable, they at times had the same amount of people as SpaceX, while having near 0 revenue. By any rational evaluation BlueOrigin is completely non-viable as a company, any they are burning billions per year.
RocketLab will likely be a real competitor eventually, but they are pretty clearly positioning themselves at being Nr.2, not aiming for flight rates nearly in SpaceX territory. And they have a lot of technical risk left to clear.
At the moment SpaceX is moving forward faster then anybody else is catching up. Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy still run loops around everybody and nobody will challenge it for another 10 years at least, and that's assuming Falcon 9 operations don't improve.
Starship isn't needed for the launch market, but for their own constellation.
I think the timeline is very difficult to predict here. We've seen countless companies who are leading in technologies who when others see it can be done... -know- it can be done so then can do it. Like the 4 minute mile.
I know it's not simple and no-one else is near SpaceX at the moment, but to ignore reusability has become an extinction-level event for launch providers. Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
Second-stage re-use is clearly the next phase and that's what Starship is targeting (plus massive capacity). I don't know if it scales to smaller rockets, but if it does (and we know that it's physically possible as some of the Starship second-stages have made it back kinda-alive), then it will be revolutionary.
Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market. I remember seeing an interview with Elon Musk talking about BYD EVs - "Yes, but look at their car, it's a joke"... to now having better tech in some ways than Tesla, and an up-to-date product line which looks way better than the staid models that Tesla is producing. Only the charging infra is keeping them ahead in terms of overall usability - and at some point that will be a solved problem for disparate third-party charging providers.
Cybertruck is a child-like anomaly which is not a mass seller. The M3 and MY are dated, and the robotaxi is merely a rehash of those stylistically (as well as completely the wrong thing to be making in terms of the market it's supposed to serve, IMO). I have read that Tesla is stuck in a rut, and their line-up looks like it. The 'highland' refresh and model y are both sticking-plaster makeovers.
When I ask my (mid 20s) kids if they'd buy a Kia EV3, a BYD Dolphin Surf or a Tesla, it's the Kia or the BYD. They look like cool cars, not something that a 50 year old (me!) would like (I prefer the EV3 if I had a choice). I know this is a bit off topic, but I'm just trying to illustrate that it's easy to think you're unassailable, and then the competition not only catches up, but overtakes. And timelines are impossible to predict to that scale, IMO.
But it hasn't, that's just a fact. Neither ULA, nor Arianespace, nor Russia have gone extinct or embraced reuse to any degree at all. Same goes for India and Japan. Because this market simply doesn't operate like typical markets.
ULA and Arianespace have lots of orders. There a complex reason for this, but its still just a reality. Neither Russia or India have made major investments in reusable rockets. China to some degree does but we have little insight.
The only competitors are all new companies that had no position in the market before.
> Like the 4 minute mile.
No amount of believe makes it just happen. You can't just work a bit harder and get there incrementally. That's not how rockets work. Its not like running at all. Runners already existed, they just needed to incrementally improve a little bit, believe can help with that.
But if you don't have the necessary rocket engine or architecture, you can't just incrementally improve to get to the goal. You need to redo the whole architecture from the ground up. No amount of testing and believe turns Ariane 5 into a Falcon 9 competitor. And that's going to cost billions even if everything goes well.
That's why non of the existing competitors have done it. Its new potential competitors coming up that work on it.
> Some will learn from the 'break it and learn quickly' mentality that SpaceX followed for getting F9 to reliable reusability and there will be more competition.
That mentality is almost 20 years old and nobody has embraced it in the same way. There are many reasons for this that I could get into. But its far more then simply a shift in mentality. If your fundamentals are wrong, no amount of mentality shift changes anything.
And even if you embrace that mentality, its still a 10 year journey, see Stoke Space for example.
And many companies that had that mentality have gone bust, see ABL and others.
> Look at the lead that Tesla has thrown away in the EV market.
Tesla lead wasn't really technological. They never had battery technology better then what many other companies can produce. Except maybe their packs, were a bit better in the beginning, but that's about it and that wasn't a huge engineering lift to replicate.
What made them get a lead is the complete believe in the concept, and their ability to raise enough money to make it happen on a large scale, plus proving there is demand.
Also I think drawing parallels between car industry and space industry isn't really relevant at all.
But all national launch providers use to supplement their income with commercial launches and SpaceX has completely sucked the air out of the room in that regard. It’s now more expensive for all these countries to keep these programs operational.
And something that went orbital at supersonic speed
Is not even remotely the same universe
McDonell Douglas have done up and down since 1992
SpaceX is the only entity that have recovered and reused any rocket parts after sending payloads orbital
Wake me up when someone have done even a test that resembles orbital recovery
Until then all the EDS in here has zero power over reality
But it also illustrates that I've seen in the Bay Area time and time again, which is that once you demonstrate that something is doable (as SpaceX has) It opens the way for other capital to create competitive systems.
At Google, where I worked for a few years, it was interesting to see how Google's understanding of search (publicly disclosed), and the infrastructure to host it (kept secret) kept it comfortably ahead of competitors until the design space was exhausted. At which point Google stopped moving forward and everyone else asymptotically approached their level of understanding and mastery.
I see the same thing happening to SpaceX. As other firms master the art of the reusable booster, SpaceX's grasp on the launch services market weakens. Just as Google's grasp of the search market weakens. Or Sun's grasp of the server market weakened. When it becomes possible to buy launch services from another vendor which are comparable (not necessarily cheaper, just comparable) without the baggage of the damage Elon has done, SpaceX will be in a tougher spot.
It also helps me to understand just how much SpaceX needs Starship in order to stay on top of the market.
Some folks will no doubt see this as casting shade on SpaceX, I assure you it is not. What SpaceX's engineering teams have accomplished remains amazing and they deserve their success. It is just someone who has been through a number of technology curves noting how similar the they play out over their lifetimes.
Having witnessed first hand how DEC felt that Sun's "toy computers" would never eclipse DEC in the Server business, and watched as United Launch Alliance dismissed Falcon 9 as something that would never seriously challenge their capabilities, it feels almost prophetic to watch SpaceX's competitors emerge.