I suppose is about "our" Art Dula.

Exactly the kind of "space endeavor" that infuriates me with the wasted time and money. "Building" lifters and craft from junkyard parts gets us exactly... nowhere.

Jim, while your post clocked in at 24 characters over the Twitter limit, I still find it a bit too concise to tell where you're coming from. Elaborate on the reason for your gripe, please.

Oh, I've said it before - until just recently, all "private spaceflight" concerns were based on re-using US or Soviet discards, meaning that while a system that would flip a few rocks skyward could be cobbled together (not that I can think of any successful ones), it's a dead end, a waste of time and resources. The equivalent would be setting oneself up as a carmaker and purveying whatever junk you can refurbish from the local wrecking yard.

The southwest space industry and Space-X in particular are finally succeeding in the right way: with new, purpose-built, sustainable systems available in essentially unlimited quantities and with realistic development futures.

Typical of Dula to jump on a model 20 years out of date, where all the money goes down the drain and there's no future path once they've worn out their old Soyuz.

Not all progress involves R&D. Some of it means building out the more mature stages of an infrastructure, establishing a market for yesterday's technology advancements. If they are pushing a market that hasn't been developed before - and I don't see any existing tourism to lunar orbit businesses - they are de facto innovating.

Maybe. But it's not sustainable; it's like finding a pistol with one round left in it and charging off to war. Maybe you'll find more rounds. Maybe someone will drop an artillery piece or nuke you can pick up and use. But it's still building on a foundation of sand, and real progress in private/nongov spaceflight has been held back for thirty years by this "let's see what's in the junkyard" approach.

I don't see how private space has been pursuing the junk reuse approach for thirty years. Are you talking about Energia? Or Delta IV? The US and in in particular Russian government have been more inclined to that strategy. But the modern private arena seems occupied with inventing their own tech, predominantly suborbital.

I won't claim to be fully up to speed on all efforts, but a huge number of (long since failed) approaches involved buying 100 old Russian missile engines and similar salvage-yard parts.

Which is to a sustainable launch or mission presence as the Apollo project was... to a sustainable mission presence.

It seems to be only the last generation of entrepreneurs who are (1) building on their own engineering with (2) enough capital to get to worthwhile goals and (3) having those worthwhile goals. Too much of "alternate space exploitation" from the 1970s to 2000 or so was underfunded junk-monkeying by people who had every same chance of success as the Marx Brothers.

This "refurb capsule to the moon" needs to be named Groucho.

I guess you're thinking of some of those old unfruited plans to use spent external tanks. I think your objection is valid if nothing comes of the plans. But if they work out and they do something new, they're expanding the frontier by definition. They're part of the solution. I'll only fault them if they fail and poison the well, but if there's any merit to their plans and they stimulate more original thinking, I'll give them credit anyway. This isn't in the same league as Joe the Plumber putting his first grader's warp drive plans on Pinterest.

You seem to be unaware of the number of efforts that have come and gone. I'm thinking of several that were going to build a mighty private space army using discarded boosters (sometimes REALLY discarded boosters - shells) and, in the one that sticks most prominently in my mind, several dozen obsolete Soviet missile engines. The last is memorable because it was supposedly the first visit of an Antonov AN-225 (the mega-monster military cargo plane) to western soil. But like all the other sort of Tom-Swift/Hardy-Boys/Young Sprogs Up at Harvard stories where our lads find a rusty engine and go on to win the Indy 500 riding it bareback, nothing seems to have ever come of these salvage efforts. Nor, with a moment's thought, could much of anything meaningful have. We DID the one-shot space program thing, and it got us bupkis until we rebuilt around nominally sustainable/reusable gear. Why should private industry be any different?

Fine, Art's going to sell a couple of loop-de-moon seats. Maybe. Eventually. Someday. For $35M each. Whoopee-ding-ding, as a friend used to say. That'll really accomplish... something. Once.