> If we knew that a Starship design would definitely work (i.e can it reach orbit? can it come back down? can all of the complexity be managed well enough to ma

> If we knew that a Starship design would definitely work (i.e can it reach orbit? can it come back down? can all of the complexity be managed well enough to make it economically feasible?) then someone would have done it already. This reminds me of the two economists out walking who find what looks like a dollar bill on the sidewalk. One is about to pick it up when the other says "If the dollar bill were really there, someone would have picked it up already". Joking aside, you can apply the same "someone would have done it already" logic to landing used boosters and reusing them repeatedly. Reusability has been thought about in rocketry/space travel since before orbital flight was possible; every pre-1957 science-fiction story about spaceships assumed that they could be used repeatedly. Von Braun's hugely influential 1950s articles about spaceflight assumed that reusable winged boosters would launch his reusable winged ferry rocket shuttles. And yet, no one tried to land a booster this way until SpaceX, 60 years after the first orbital launch.