If profit is your sole motivator and guide then you may not be fit for a discussion about rockets.

The profit motive has proved, over and over, to be a more effective motivator than anything else, including getting whipped and/or shot for failure.

I remember an earthquake in LA caused a freeway interchange to collapse. The government offered an incentive of something like a million bucks for every day the rebuild was completed ahead of schedule. The contractor got it done in a stupendously short time.

Yes: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/us/02ramp.html

Which is still something that CA sometimes does, with apparently good results: https://www.ktvu.com/news/california-contractor-earns-8m-bon...

>The profit motive has proved, over and over, to be a more effective motivator than anything else.

The USSR and it's space program would argue differently.

How so? NASA wasn't motivated by the profit motive in the 1960s, either. And SpaceX has completely trounced NASA and the Russians in rocket technology.

If you can't even break even then your entire venture stops. Stopping development and launches is by definition failure. This seems pretty obvious.

I am also not launching rockets. It seems like I am launching exactly as many rockets as Carmack, thus by simple math I am just as successful/good at launching rockets at Carmack.

DC-X predates Carmack and SpaceX both. The actual challenge is to produce an economically viable product that can survive beyond grants and investors. This is important, as it determines whether the system continues to operate or not. Falcon 9, and not the DC-X, flies today.

I think doing it with booster capable of actually putting things into orbit must be a challenging aspect of the problem too. DC-X and Carmack weren't doing this part.

It is what is driving spacex. They also embrace failure. It is where they learn what went wrong and fix it. At one point they were 4 rockets away from going out of business. I think they got down to the last 1 or 2 and they worked and spacex got to stay around and do cool stuff. Without money that company would not exist. They are now forcing the whole industry to re-think what it means to fire a rocket off. They have shifted everyone into thinking reuse is the best way forward. Where as before everything was mostly a one off special one time build. That profit is what is making them sustainable instead of the whims of some senator from whatever state decides to spike your program in favor of his buddies program.