Brief discussion of Spacex's success

It is supposed to be brief, so let me be brief.  I wrote many, many posts on possible ways to get to space in a way that could be economical, but this was the solution.  I never would have thunk this one up.  In fact, I didn't.  Maybe that's why I am not a billionaire.

Sometimes a solution is simple, but everybody makes it hard.  What did Spacex do here that hasn't already been done in some other context?

First of all, he targets the drone ship with his first stage.  This may seem pretty impressive, but the military has been targeting objects with missiles for a long time now.  You can hit a pin point with an ICBM, and have been able to do this for decades.  So, to hit a barge in the Atlantic is no biggie.

Making it soft land isn't a biggie either.  NASA has been landing craft on other heavenly bodies for decades.  Even before Apollo 11, there were some soft landings on the moon.  Those were dress rehearsals for the time when they were they put a crew on board and they needed to be sure that they could do it.  This feat isn't new, but the context is new.

So, he can pin point his rocket stage to soft land on where he wants.  The feat has occurred before, but what makes this different is in how and why it is being done this way.  He's not trying to destroy the drone ship, nor the rocket stage.  There was a way to do that, and he found it from skill sets that already existed. 

This is not to minimize the achievement, but only to point out that we may already know how to solve many problems.  It may only take somebody who has the will to do it.  You may want to ask why nobody seems to have that will when it comes to so many things that could use it these days.