I am no expert, but I wouldn’t be surprised if full reuseability of the upper stage turns out to be a technological dead end.
It seems to only start making remotely sense on really big rockets and once to got all that mass into space, why not keep it up there to do something better with it?
Well ideally you’d only be trying to re-use the upper stage portions that serve their purpose in a launch. The payload should definitely stay in orbit or beyond.
I am no expert, but I wouldn’t be surprised if full reuseability of the upper stage turns out to be a technological dead end.
It seems to only start making remotely sense on really big rockets and once to got all that mass into space, why not keep it up there to do something better with it?
Well ideally you’d only be trying to re-use the upper stage portions that serve their purpose in a launch. The payload should definitely stay in orbit or beyond.