My mother is involved in environmentalism, and she grimaces and tsks, every time me and Dad get in an outer space conversation, because she considers launches to be wasteful. Well, that much is true, but it's also exciting and inspiring for me.

But I was scrolling through the list of SpaceX recovery successes yesterday, and they've had hundreds, hundreds of safe booster landings. I mean, the Apollo mission discarded every last component of the spacecraft to make a round trip, and the Space Shuttle began conserving the most important part, the orbiter, but SpaceX is downright parsimonious in pioneering recoverable flight components. They don't hesitate to go after those fairing halves wherever they landed. Sadly it is just not practical to recover higher stages or obsolete satellites--yet.

Yea I hear that thing a lot. Or the common "why can't we all just cooperate" in the context of yet another rocket company. But of course, if we had pooled our resources we'd still have super shitty rockets.