Originally Posted by
ORAC
Another successful Falcon 9 launch - and recovery. This time the first stage landed on the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” in mid-Atlantic.
It almost seems routine now, but it must be remembered nobody else can do anything like it at all.
I still think it's pretty gob-smacking technology, particularly the relatively short time between design and production.
Compare it with any military aircraft project, for example, and it really illustrates well how damned good SpaceX are at this stuff.
For example, SpaceX was founded in 2002, and we have a pretty reliable production vehicle working now, 16 years after the company was founded and only 7 years after SpaceX announced that it was developing a reusable delivery vehicle.
Lockheed Martin started F-35 development in 1992, first flew the aircraft 14 years later in 2006 and it first entered service 11 years after that, in 2015.