How do you go from this

The only two space entities today that have "reused" anything are NASA and Blue origin.

>No one seriously expects Falcon accomplish useful things
Launching satellites at a lower price is useful. Even without re-usability this tech is cheaper, with it it's wildly cheaper.

Look, I understand being skeptical. Musk is kind of a cunt and is infamous for cutting corners and missing milestones, but this kind of technology is a good thing. Reusable rockets are a fucking game-changer. By the time we're old men, people will proibably regard going into space as not THAT big of a deal, akin to buying a nice car.

Even if Elon fails,other people will step in and try this again,whether it's Bezos or some other billionaire or a state. Because it's massively useful. The sheer cost of putting things into orbit strangles our access to space,if you could cut that in half,or even more, you'd do a lot of good.

$60 mil vs $125 mil per launch doesn't matter when insurance costs $100 mil and the satellite costs $600 mil

>This stemmed from doing two things nobody else has done before: immersing the helium tanks in the liquid oxygen tank, and using subcooled propellant for increased density.
Not just that, but also having using a COPV tank
If it wasn't for the carbon exploding with the LOX + ignition source nothing would have happened.
A titanium tank would have been fine

>A titanium tank would have been fine
An oxygen impermeable fiberglass wrapped COPV would have been fine too.

>By the time we're old men, people will proibably regard going into space as not THAT big of a deal, akin to buying a nice car.

Some of us are already old men, and heard this song a time or two before.

Not saying I don't hope it's really true this time. But I'm from Earth, the "Show Me Planet."

I assure you that 50 million dollars always matters
Even if you are spending 500+ million total on the launch

Sure, that was an important part of the problem, but I don't think COPVs were new.

>$60 mil vs $125 mil per launch doesn't matter when insurance costs $100 mil and the satellite costs $600 mil
It matters when you start developing technology and producing duplicates. For instance, you can take that savings and throw up a second $5 mil satellite that's just a cobbled-together testbed for some things you'd like to consider using on your next gen vehicle. Or you can buy some space on a DragonLab flight that's cheap because the launches are.

Another thing is that when SpaceX gets up to speed, they're going to be able to launch on short notice. You'll be able to order a launch one month, and see your payload in orbit the next month, because they've got a bunch of reusable boosters sitting around ready to go, and they can produce enough upper stages to fly twice a week. The current (and pre-SpaceX) situation is a years-long waiting list.

If the satellite + insurance + launch now costs $825 million, then it'll pay off fast to buy some cheap, quick-turnaround development launches to iterate cost-reduction strategies.

I've mentioned this in every STS bitching thread. It (1969-1979) was simply a different era, everyone back then (NASA, defense contractors, Congress, regular people) had unrealistic expectations for the future of flight. Everyone seriously thought that by 1990 supersonic flight would be the norm and by 2000 hypersonic (ie LEO) flight would be commercially viable. They expected ramjet tech to evolve a lot faster than it did.

In that situation, the Shuttle made a lot of sense. It could have eventually had it's engines replaced with newer ones, allowing for smaller internal fuel tanks. It even had a huge cargo bay which could be used for something like a ramjet engine allowing for the boosters could be eliminated. Future shuttles would have integrated advancements in tech and be SSTOs. The original Orbiter itself would have been phased out by the early 90s.

It didn't happen due to Congress's decision to deregulate the airlines in 1978, switching the industry from monopolastic to perfectly competitive. As a result, airlines no longer had lots of spare money to throw at manufacturers for R&D. This has more or less stalled aerospace tech, which since 1980 has been based completely on implementing fly-by-wire control systems but not much else. This accounts for Boeing's newest aircraft, the 787, which is made out of composites that increase fuel efficiency but not speed.

In hindsight it looks stupid but this is a situation where you need to actually look back at contemporary sources (again 1969-79) and the decision to build the shuttle makes a lot of sense. It was only by the late 80s, when TWA and Pan-Am started having financial problems, did people realize that it wasn't such an amazing idea. Which is how we got Orion/Ares V, which would have been flying by last year if not for 9/11 causing the government to reorganize the military/intelligence superstructure (at great cost) in the early 00s.

The Shuttle was meant to eventually create a private space industry, it was supposed to be the "DC9 for space". That didn't pan out.