> But differently, in the US, reusability is a thing despite the 'old guard' (NASA hasn't pushed the development of reusable vehicles itself, it has merely acce

> But differently, in the US, reusability is a thing despite the 'old guard' (NASA hasn't pushed the development of reusable vehicles itself, it has merely accepted them when private individuals got frustrated enough to do it themselves), while in Europe, it's promising that the ESA itself is invested in reusable rocketry. That is totally wrong. What NASA did do is create a platform for private competition with the hope that some kind of innovation would come out of it his. The policy foundation for this was set up in the 90s and this allowed companies like SpaceX to come up and have the chance to innovate without direct government control. This innovation was then quickly adopted by NASA and DoD who saw that it was useful. NASA and DoD have a much stronger adoption of reusability then anything we see from ESA. Yes, SLS is not reusable unfortunately, but NASA by now can't really change that from happening anyway. NASA itself doesn't have to be involved in re-usability development because its already solved for them. > while in Europe, it's promising that the ESA itself is invested in reusable rocketry. So they are invested in re-usability and yet the first real rocket planned with it might happen in the late 2030s? The reality is that ESA was actively hostile to re-usability literally up to the point of self delusion and then begrudgingly started to do some minor investments in it. > What I'm saying is that ULA, for its so-called next-gen rocket, plans something as 'dumb' as 'SMART' reuse for those engines, which is a waste given their capabilities. ULA is a political creation and its lobbying power depends on using parts from different large companies and that includes solids. Solids make full stack re-usability hard. Now while 'SMART' re-usability might be 'dumb' is a whole heck of a lot better then no re-usability of Ariane 6. > NASA and the contractors it has been mostly associated with SpaceX is NASA largest contractor outside of SLS/Orion program, and those were adopted before SpaceX was relevant. In recent years SpaceX has won the waste majority of contracts. Blue has one some, and the are in on re-usability. The contractors you mention that are not focused on re-usability have consistently not been winning many contracts. > To explain why this bothers me, as part of Artemis, NASA has repeatedly used the phrase "sustainable presence", yet the way they behave as an organization does not correspond with wanting to be sustainable. To me it's seeming increasingly more likely that Artemis too will fade out after a few landings. I agree that the SLS/Orion program is not 'substainable' or embraces re-usability. But those programs are 15-25 years old and once they started its politics that substain them. If NASA could go back and redo those things today, it would look very different. Politics has force NASA into situation where SLS/Orion is politically unkillable and NASA is doing its best to use the rest of their budget to actually make progress. Using the moon lander funding and giving it to Starship is a fantastic move to break SLS only (if fake) claim to relevance.