Reusable Rockets Quotes

It was obvious to me that we could never colonize Mars without reusability, any more than America would have been colonized if they had to burn the ships after every trip.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It'll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn't been reusable.

Virgin Galactic, which will be operating SpaceShipTwo, will be only one of several spacelines. The competitors for Virgin include the Russians, Bezos's Blue Origin, and possibly Rocketplane Kistler. And likely a couple of others who are smart enough not to tell people what they are doing!

Since SpaceX's very beginnings, they have talked about recovering and reusing at least the first stages of their rockets.

You can just reload, propel it and fly again. This is extremely important for revolutionizing access to space because as long as we continue to throw away rockets and space crafts, we will never truly have access to space.

Do we really need these big, gigantic, heavy rockets? What if we launch a rocket that's empty, and its sole purpose is to act as a source of fuel on the Moon? Who should build that? Well, I think the U.S. should build that.

The expense of getting into space is the rocket launch, the rocket itself. Rocket's right now, commercial rockets cost probably somewhere between $50, or $120, or $150 million per launch. And those are all expendable. That is, you've got to buy a new rocket for each launch. So, that really is the critical part. If there was some kind of really, a revolutionary breakthrough and the price of rockets fell by an order of magnitude, I mean, just imagine what that would do as far as getting access to more ordinary people.

SpaceX lowered the cost of going into space by 10x.

Every mode of transport that we use - whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses - is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization.

I have watched SS2 evolve over the years into an incredible vehicle that is going to open up space to more people than ever before.

SpaceX has reopened the cosmos, and the space race is back on, only this time it is in the private sector.

We're taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.

Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection.

If you have a Falcon Heavy, and you have a Dragon, and you have a Bigelow module, then all of a sudden, life gets interesting.

To allow public access to orbit, we would need breakthroughs that would lower the cost by a lot more than an order of magnitude and increase safety by a factor of 100 as compared to every launch system used since the first manned space flight. I think airborne launch will be a significant part of the safety solution.

Reusable rockets promise much easier testing because you should usually get them back, and you can debug as you go rather than having to get everything perfect the first time.

The strategic objective of New Shepard is to practice, and a lot of the subcomponents of New Shepard actually get directly reused on the second stage of New Glenn.

When we can demonstrate that we can take off horizontally and put something into orbit, then we can begin to talk about increasing the amount of payload. But to say, 'I'm going to do that and put people into orbit' is a real leap.