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This is not the disruption you're looking for. Every launch you're throwing away the entire machine. People keep coming up with the pithy 'imagine how expensive a transatlantic ticket would be if ditched the 747 into the sea at the end of every flight' but it's precisely true. Fuel costs hardly anything, the cost is of these fantastically advanced but single use machines.

So, make them properly reusable (not just rebuildable, not just reusable only say 5 times, able to turn around and fly again within a week) and you will change everything.

To my knowledge there's only sat launcher in the world that's working towards this, (the Skylon Space Plane) but that's probably 10 years and a few billion dollars away.

I don't know how reusable SpaceX's grasshopper efforts will be (as I intimated above there's reusable and then there's reusable). But I watch with fascination!




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