> > and with the vehicle reaching orbit with more payload mass per take-off mass than just about any non-nuclear launch vehicle ever proposed. Sure but that is

> > and with the vehicle reaching orbit with more payload mass per take-off mass than just about any non-nuclear launch vehicle ever proposed. Sure but that is not a relevant measure. > Elon Musk is a good salesman, and obviously has a vested interest in promoting rockets over any alternative. He is also an engineer who had money to create any company he wanted to hand he didn't invest in an air-breathing engine. And as I said, transporting human from a to b might be one thing, but for actual launch it will not be competitive. > (temperature, weather, noise, no complex launch sites and so on) When you have nothing that is even remotely close to working, making all kinds of claims about how amazing it will be is really easy. Building a complex shaped air-frame that is supposed to hold liquid hydrogen is already incredibly complex. Then saying it will also be able to launch in bad weather, at any temperature without launch infrastructure on a standard airport. It will of course also amazingly stable. Color me skeptical that a team that has never managed to do much of anything could pull of a whole long, long list of highly speculative, incredibly innovative new concepts that have never flown before. And not only get it to work once, but actually survive reentry heating, land on a standard airfield and quickly launch again. > when they're solving each challenge as it comes along, such as the working precooler. [2] They are moving threw a whole host of complex issues extremely slowly and from the whole Skylon plane they have maybe solved 2% of the issues.