>Carmack made reusable, vertically landing rockets before SpaceX did, albeit on a much smaller scale.
No, he didn't, or perhaps more generously "much smaller scale" is doing a LOT of work in your sentence. The core challenge of real rockets is all about scale/speed, and in particular getting to orbit which is where the vast majority of the value starts. The Rocket Equation and material science makes that a completely different scale of challenge to do at all, let alone with a sufficiently useful mass fraction, let alone with reuse, vs anything suborbital. Neither Armadillo nor the DC-X were going to orbit. Hobbies are neat but going from that to something real represents a huge huge amount of work and skill.
His co-founder at Oculus, Palmer Luckey, talked about how he did on the Arthi and Sriram podcast (both hosts with considerable big tech experience and VCs at A16Z). He said the company was
> "very successful, probably the most successful (rocket) company in its time in it's budget range. They were doing better things than companies spending 100x more money. They moved very fast, building a vertical take-off and landing rocket, actually long before SpaceX did."
No, he didn't, or perhaps more generously "much smaller scale" is doing a LOT of work in your sentence. The core challenge of real rockets is all about scale/speed, and in particular getting to orbit which is where the vast majority of the value starts. The Rocket Equation and material science makes that a completely different scale of challenge to do at all, let alone with a sufficiently useful mass fraction, let alone with reuse, vs anything suborbital. Neither Armadillo nor the DC-X were going to orbit. Hobbies are neat but going from that to something real represents a huge huge amount of work and skill.