No, there was no reusable first stage before SpaceX, and pretty much everyone in the industry was laughing at Elon for even proposing it.
Would you please stop lying about SpaceX?
Reusable first stages are not an achievement. Reusable rockets were invented 30 years before SpaceX. Using such rockets as first stages is a questionable decision by SpaceX, which may be a means to an end if it can save costs.
Exactly. And us Europeans just got our collective ass handed to us, realizing that our new shiny planned rockets wont cut it in direct competition even if us tax payers shoulder the development costs.
Elon says stupid things sometimes, but I would rather have most of the time, than more stupid manager talk from our German companies with their 'electrified intelligence' and AI in our dashboards (because they bind a GPS coordinate to a setting like Tesla).
