Elon Musk in 2011: Fully and Rapidly Reusable Rockets Are Achievable—And SpaceX Will Try

Here's Elon Musk in 2011 announcing he believes full and rapidly reusable rockets are achievable.

“The pivotal breakthrough that some company has to come up with to make life multiplanetary is a fully and rapidly reusable orbit-class rocket.

This is a very difficult thing to do because we live on a planet where that is just barely possible. If gravity were a little lower, it would be easy. If it was a little higher, it would be impossible.

It's just a very tough engineering problem. I wasn't sure it could be solved for a while. But then, relatively recently, in the last twelve months or so, I've come to the conclusion that it can be solved.

SpaceX is going to try to do it. We could fail. I'm not saying we're certain of success, but we're going to try to do it. We have a design that, on paper, doing the calculations, doing the simulations, does work.

We need to make sure that those simulations and reality agree, because generally when they don't, reality wins.”

National Press Club, 2011