>>14205606Elon has an easy ten years left, pessimistically. Ten years is more than enough time to take Starship into commercial operation and rack up more launches than any other launch vehicle family in history. If the development of the Falcon 9 was like the evolution of animal movement during the precambrian, the development of Starship will be like the evolution of vision in predatory cambrian arthropods. It's going to cause the extinction of the holdovers form the old space era and an explosion in new funding and development projects for competitive fully reusable launchers. It is simply too late for the space industry to turn back, we've gone from waterwheels and drive belts to electric generators and motors, we've gone from coal fired steam engines to oil burning internal combustion engines, we've gone from wooden sailing vessels to motorized iron ships, and we will go from expendable and partially reusable rockets to fully reusable launch vehicles. Everyone knows that it can be done and it can be done more economically than the cheapest expendable rockets.
Just as anomalocaris was the superpredator of its day, only to later be out-competed by ever more developed predators, so too will SpaceX someday lose its drive and flexibility and eventually crumble apart, but that's okay. It has happened to literally every organization in history. There will be companies as adept as SpaceX, in fact with future engineering tools and manufacturing technology there will be companies that exceed anything SpaceX has accomplished. It is inevitable.
