Chinese rockets companies are evolving at insane pace, including RLVs. A couple of big milestones have been achieved this year alone, like first stage landing.
replyI certainly hope ‘economically viable’ includes properly priced externalities for e.g. side effects of burning hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of aluminium and other materials in the high atmosphere.
replyThat's the fun part, they don't need to be viable. It's just the excuse to shovel tons of money to Trump donors, by rerunning the scam that was SDI.
replyAnd they never will be because it's always going to be cheaper to build them on the ground.
Its only cheaper to build them on the ground if you aren't factoring security concerns. No insurgents in space. Not every application needs this hardening, but you can imagine there are many applications that do.
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