SpaceX Dragon Version 2 Unveil - live webcast
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It's not just rocketry that has false dawns.
I was just watching a show on the Concorde SST. There was competition between the US, Russia, and France and Britain for developing supersonic airliners, which were hyped as the next stage in air travel. In the US, wall street gave a thumbs down, and taxpayers were unwilling to pay for it. Russia abandoned theirs after a fiery crash at an air show. Britain and France worked together, but finally threw in the towel in 2001.
Nuclear energy was supposed to be "too cheap to meter", but it was too expensive to matter. The hyped "nuclear renaissance" ended quickly.
In the 1980s, Japan shocked the computing industry with a massive project to develop 5th generation computing, especially AI. US companies freaked out, anti-monopoly laws prevented them from co-ordinating like Japan, so congress passed special legislation to create a US consortium. It ended in "AI winter":
In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research.[1] The term was coined by analogy to the idea of a nuclear winter.
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The term first appeared in 1984 as the topic of a public debate at the annual meeting of AAAI (then called the "American Association of Artificial Intelligence"
. It is a chain reaction that begins with pessimism in the AI community, followed by pessimism in the press, followed by a severe cutback in funding, followed by the end of serious research.[3] At the meeting, Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky—two leading AI researchers who had survived the "winter" of the 1970s—warned the business community that enthusiasm for AI had spiraled out of control in the '80s and that disappointment would certainly follow. Three years later, the billion-dollar AI industry began to collapse.[3]
Hype cycles are common in many emerging technologies, such as the railway mania or the dot-com bubble.
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One thing about Musk is that he knows what he's up against, he's said "there's a reason nobodies made fully reusable rockets yet, it's really really hard!" (not an exact quote).
He's also said he won't retire if he doesn't achieve fully reusable rockets, he'll keep working on it because he considers it so important to humanity's future.
We don't need supersonic airplanes, subsonic planes are perfectly adequate.
We don't need nuclear energy, peer reviewed studies have shown it's basically irrelevant as far as stopping global warming: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1127&pid=63772
We don't need artificial intelligence, natural intelligence works just fine (most of the time).
But right now, rockets are the only way off the planet, and it's extremely important for humanities future. So whatever advancements Musk makes are a good thing, even if he never achieves fully reusable rockets.