“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” - Winston Churchill
Reusable rockets were more of an economic issue, is there enough demand for economic viability. That was always going to be the real magic. I think that is still an open question but it at least appears plausible.
It just doesn't seem very practical, basically you'd need to transport freight to places with no access to sea/roads or rails and can't fit it on an airplane. Is there a lot of demand for this? Also presumably such areas would have harsh and unpredictable weather..
> Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm
Survivor bias? For every case of it working out there are many more of people wasting time and enthusiasm on something that's a dead end (and this was the general consensus for the past 80 years or so)
The challenge is fitting the engineering required into the revenue that could be expected from those tiny markets It's tempting to characteristize turbine blade delivery as bigger than tiny, but compared to commodity transport like shuttling containers between China and the rest of the world that's still tiny.
Hyperloop (and vacuum train systems for the ~100 years they were called that before the Musk rebrand) had physics problems, and no matter how hard anyone tried, they were guaranteed to run into them. Cargo airships also have a physics problem that make them absurdly expensive and risky to put cargo on. In both cases, this is an idea that is 100 years old and where the physics has been studied. This time is not different unless you have solid reasoning.
Contrast that with rockets, to use another Musk example: Rockets are well within the bounds of physics, but a hard engineering problem. Landing a rocket propulsively was also known to be an "impossible" engineering challenge that was first demonstrated in the 1990's (with too low reliability).
If they can't do that, at least they could be competitive.
That is not a winning combination for putting any kind of freight carrying out of business. The main reason people use air freight today is to get something from one continent to another in 24 hours. Airships will never do that.
No it wasn't. It was done many times in the 60s and 70s — e.g. all the moon landings.