>>28590907
It worked like SHIT for decades wasting BILLIONS with paltry little to show for it that could have been used to make better systems instead and you save A LOT more fuel by not having all that dead weight and drag to overcome in the first place.
So many sparkless wordcel morons with no visiospatial imagination who seem to think that lifting surfaces and all attendant subsystems thereto just spontaneously appear in orbit when it's time for reentry. Reality check: you have to boost all that shit up there IN THE FIRST PLACE. Heavy ass needs more thrust. Draggy ass needs more thrust. More fuel, more weight, lower payload, ballooning costs, nothing going to space.
The amount of thrust a rocket needs to change velocity at the end of its flight is TINY because it's already EMPTY.
You truly cannot comprehend how much of a game changer the Falcon rockets were. In 1999, the total lift to orbit capacity was roughly 183739kg. By 2022, this had grown to over 900,000 kilograms, a nearly 500% increase, and Musk's SpaceX is personally responsible for 96% of all of it, and with less than a tenth of NASA's annual budget in costs, because they made space cheap, and this made all sorts of things possible, new valuable pursuits that theretofore had only been dreamed of.
Because, amongst other things, he didn't tell his engineers to do something stupid like yet another stillborn dead on arrival 'space plane', he had them design a proper reusable rocket that flies the way a rocket properly should, and it made him one of the most consequential men on the planet as a result. The washington empire relies on SpaceX for EVERYTHING; communications, command and control, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. It's literally and unironically one of the only load bearing pillars left in its house of cards.
