Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.

i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ

and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone.

NASA (with the shuttle and saturn V) had a completely different idea on rocket development (and blue origin seems to follow their mindset), which is fine. but to say that this is "failure fetish" when spacex has an amazing track record is just hating for the sake of hating.

i would recommend, if you have the time, the book liftoff, by eric berger https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac... -- it was the book that opened my eyes to why spacex works like they do.

PaulHoule · 2023-10-16 · Original thread
There is a proven market for orbital flights for communication satellites, cube sats, space exploration, sending people to the space station, etc.

There aren't really that many commercial uses for unmanned suborbital flights. For instance if you just want to test something in zero gravity for a short time maybe you can do your experiment faster in a drop tower.

Manned suborbital flights are so expensive that the market is this tiny intersection of people who can afford it and who want to do it. If it was $500 you would get lots of people to sign up, but at current prices I think there's no way to sell enough seats to pay back the development costs of the machine.

Eric Berger wrote a great book on SpaceX

https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac...

There are a lot of government reports on the subject from the 1980-2000 range where people were considering the needs of launching for the strategic defense initiative, this is a typical one

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/CSAT/documents/O...

but not the one I was really looking for. I would say follow up the references on

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_vehicle

and try to dig up more of the same.