martinbayer said:
The same that has happened to all other RLV concepts to date - nothing...
I remain skeptical that SpaceX is going to make reusability work. Even if they can make it work
technically, the economics may be marginal and it may not succeed. And certainly there has been a tremendous amount of hype over what they are doing, with many fanboys already declaring success and designing their own space programs based upon cost savings that they pull out of thin air, or a monkey's butt.
That said, I think there is an important distinction between what SpaceX is doing now and the previous RLV concepts and it is that a lot of them required some big leaps with no intermediary steps and no way to gradually move towards reusability. Everything just had to be
designed, and then work right. With SpaceX, they're actually doing testing with vehicles that are otherwise operational. So the testing is just a bonus, and if the test does not succeed, they're still okay. And in fact, even if they don't get their reusable first stage to work economically, they are still left with an economical throwaway rocket. So they get something out of it. The same is not true of Black Horse or the other earlier proposals. If they didn't work technically, you were screwed, and if they didn't work economically, you were also screwed.