Fully reusable rockets will create the entrepreneurial space age

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Elon Musk SpaceX BFR and Jeff Bezos Blue Origin are targeting fully reusable rockets.

The reusable rocket age should have started in the 1980s. However, cost-plus contracts and political bureaucracy split manufacturing of the space shuttle into 50 states. The plan was for space shuttle flights to happen once a week and for the cost to be $5 million instead of the $1+ billion that they did cost.

There has been a 40-year delay to the fully reusable rocket age.

Elon and Jeff are aware of the history of commercial air travel as bigger and more efficient planes developed from the 1920s to today.

Elon with the BFR will be leaping the reusable rocket age to the equivalent of the 1950s or 1960s in commercial aviation. The BFR could bring the cost per launch down to $5 million.

The US government needs to get out of the corruption of the Space Launch System and Lunar Gateway where $5+ billion per year will be wasted. These funds should be used to boost the US and world economy with many trillions of dollars per year from new space industries.

Nearly 50,000 people would fly Britain’s Imperial Airways from 1930 until 1939. They paid as much as $20,000 when adjusted for inflation.

Reacting to competition from nonscheduled airlines, Capital Airlines in 1948 introduced the first coach fares. Although approved reluctantly by the C.A.B., these lower fares immediately became popular and introduced air travel to a much broader passenger market.

Several “non-skeds” pooled their resources to create North American Airlines in 1950. N.A.A. began offering daily Los Angeles-New York service at a one-way fare of only $99. Everyone found out low-cost service could be profitable. Major airlines forced the C.A.B. to shutdown N.A.A. in 1955.

Surplus Douglas C-47 transports (military versions of the DC-3) boosted and ex-WW2 air force pilots would start freight transportation companies. The post-war period was an entrepreneurial age for commercial aviation.

1957 was the year when the number of passengers traveling by air within the US exceeded the number going by rail for the first time.

The jet age started with the de Havilland Comet, which became the first jet airliner to cross the Atlantic in October 1958. The larger and more economical Boeing 707 arrived 3 weeks later.

Jumbo Jets arrived in the 1970s and further cut costs.