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@elonmusk on why Starship is hard.
"Starship is the most complicated machine ever made by humans, by a long shot. Any project I can think of would be easier than this, and that's why no one has made a fully reusable orbital rocket."
Most people treat rockets like airplanes with bigger tanks. Elon is saying full reuse is a different class of problem — heat shield, engines that fly twice, tanker rendezvous, and a vehicle that has to work as a system, not a one-shot firework.
• Expendable rockets — throw away the machine every flight
• Partial reuse — booster returns; upper stage still dies
• Full reuse — same ship flies again; cost collapses toward airline economics
Hard is the point.
Reuse is the unlock.
Starship is the vehicle.
"It's a very hard problem that many smart people have failed at."