Elon Musk: “No one has ever created a fully reusable orbital heat shield…”

“They're expandable and even say for the shuttle heat shield, they would lose many of the tiles on every flight and they'd have to refurbish the heat shield between each flight. So No one has ever created a fully reusable orbital heat shield before. In fact, no one has created a fully reusable orbital rocket before. And Falcon 9 is the first rocket where there's at least the boost stage is reusable on a regular basis and where it actually makes economic sense.” (06:07–06:11)

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.