SpaceX has done critical work on GPU accelerated computational fluid dynamics for modeling rocket engine combustion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txk-VO1hzBY

SpaceX has done critical work on GPU accelerated computational fluid dynamics for modeling rocket engine combustion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txk-VO1hzBY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txk-VO1hzBY And saying this is about money and resources, and not focus and management, ignores the fact that SpaceX spent less than ULA and Blue Origin to develop 2 rocket engines, 3 rockets, three different recovery systems, and 2 different capsules. Blue Origin has been spending $1 billion a year of Jeff Bezos's money, and despite starting before SpaceX, still hasn't reached orbit or beaten the Falcon 1. Rocket Lab's Electron made it to orbit with $210m of total funding, and they built their own engine with an electric pump. Far smaller than many other companies. The reason why SpaceX is so successful is because Elon Musk isn't in it a vanity project, or to make money taking a slice of the LEO sat launch market. He has a vision, call it lunacy, of getting huge numbers of people to Mars. Working backwards from that goal, informs everything they do, which is why they won't settle for an incremental improvement on what ULA or Arianne is doing. It's like saying if you gave equal money in 2001-2006 to someone to build better mobile phones, they would have produced an iPhone, because most of the components were there. I worked in the mobile market at that point, and I can tell you most people were chasing Blackberry, or imagining slightly better versions of say, an Nokia Communicator 9000, iPAQPhone, or OQO. The iPhone took a vision, and someone willing to tell the naysayers and corner cutters that he doesn't care about their objections, this is what they're doing. For TEN YEARS on USENET, I read sci.space as people like Henry Spencer and other luminaries decried reusability. They rightly said that anything wings, or landing legs, or extra strengthening and margin you add to have repeated flights comes out of your payload. The major consensus of the time would be to tell Musk his ideas won't work and the physics say disposable rockets are the most efficient. But marginal cost matters more than Isp or payload fraction, and if you have a system where the majority of your costs are amortized over many launches, lower payload is less relevent, you just do more launches. Ultimately, SpaceX will prove the naysayers wrong, as surely as he proved the establishment and ULA's allies wrong.