Honda conducts successful launch and landing of experimental reusable rocket

Here is the video which they should have put in the post:

https://global.honda/content/dam/site/global-en/topics-new/c...

Agreed, it brings the story home. What I most like about this news is that Honda has joined Blue Origin and SpaceX in demonstrating a complete "hop" (all though my all time favorite is the "ring of fire" video SpaceX did.)

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

The end of fossil fuels seem pretty boring. The worst case is that you replace them with nuclear, which has costs on par with fossil fuels to begin with. If we're lucky some kind of cheap scalable energy storage tech is developed and then energy costs less than it did historically.

> The worst case is that you replace them with nuclear

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.

It is possibly to create synthetic fuel from coal. For usecases that absolutely require fuel we would be able to synthetically create it.