What's needed is for a Starship* to be recovered and reflown. We would then want to know how much refurbishment went into flying again and what the weight of the thermal protection system was. These would determine if the system was economical or not. Longer term, how many times can the ship be reflown? At what cost?
*i.e., the second stage
When I was a professor I always found it harder to debug code written by my students as compared with debugging code I had created myself. This is now even more of an issue when I try to debug code created by an LLM**.
* See my blog of 1 January 2025.
** No, coding is not "solved." That's the capitalists lying again. There are still lots of bugs to find and fix.
I am glad to see the effort and resources currently being spent on A.I., robotics, and space travel. I don't expect that these efforts will produce anywhere near what's being promised of course. Each of these efforts is currently too narrowly focused, they should all be more broadly based.
