Tim Dodd

And one of the big efficiency gains was,

You no longer have, you know, a corner engine and then like a edge engine and then another corner engine.

You can just make eight of the same, you know, kind of part of the OctaWeb it's called, you know, the same shape.

And then your interchangeability and your manufacturability becomes a lot simpler.

So that was kind of one of the bigger upgrades at first, and they kept stretching it.

Every time they touched this thing, it got longer and taller and taller, technically.

And then the next big feature that you saw in 2014 would have been they added landing legs to a Falcon 9 rocket, which was... That was the first launch I ever went to, was actually to see... It was CRS-3, so Commercial Resupply Mission 3, and it was probably their... God, I don't remember what that was like.

their 14th or 15th launch or something like pretty early on.

And people were literally laughing at the idea of them putting landing legs on it.

They just thought it was stupid.

They're like, why are they wasting?

Why is this billionaire Elon Musk guy wasting his time trying to land a rocket?

It's not going to work.

I think reusability definitely, you know, it's a necessary part of making any kind of interplanetary mission.

You know, in order to actually do that, just financially, you have to start reusing these things.

I can't speak for Elon and SpaceX, but it was pretty immediate that they wanted to try to recover.

And as a matter of fact, I think the very first two Falcon 9 rockets and Falcon 1, I think they even wanted to try to recover immediately.

using parachutes to recover the first stage.

And now fast forward, you know, almost 20 years later and Rocket Lab is actually doing a concept like that where they're pulling a parachute after the first stage is reentering and they actually are trying to recover it with a helicopter.

It's going to try to snatch it out of the air.