This kind of thinking contributed to American rocketry being trapped in a local maxima for decades. There are many reasons it became trapped, but one of the primary reasons was that rocket scientists would insist on optimising rocket engines at the expense of every other aspect of the vehicle.

"The logic of rocket equation is brutal and inexorable", the NASA rocket scientists would say. "As the performance of the rocket engine decreases linearly, the propellent requirements increases exponentially. Therefore it is imperative to have the highest-possible performance from your rocket engines. The combustion of liquid hydrogen / oxygen is the highest-efficiency chemical reaction, and therefore liquid hydrogen is the only propellant we will consider using for our engines."

All of this was correct, but also wrong. It was wrong in a whole-systems context, because:

A.) Liquid hydrogen is much lower-density than traditional rocket fuels like Kerosene, requiring far larger and heavier structures to carry the same amount of energy, and larger and heavier engines and plumbing and everything else -- and the structural mass of a rocket matters.

B.) Liquid hydrogen will boil off and leak through anything, requiring massive amounts of insulation (again, adding weight), and far stricter operational protocols around the fueled vehicle.

C.) Liquid hydrogen is so cold that it will embrittle and shatter ordinary metals and requires much more exotic and expensive metallurgy.

and finally, D.) The alternative, kerosene, gives you less efficient engines but also much lighter-weight vehicles -- and sure, per that inexorable logic of the rocket equation, you need to use more fuel for the same amount of payload, but kerosene is cheaper than milk so who fucking cares?

Anyhow, the upshot of this is that US rocket scientists spent literally tens of billions of dollars developing hyper-locally-optimised rocketry schemes, most of which failed outright. For the remainder, for every dollar of kerosene they didn't have to buy, they probably spent upwards of $1000 on exotic aerospace hardware. Finally, they gave up and just bought kerosene-based engines from the Russians.

So then there's Elon Musk. And of course there's a ton of brilliant rocket science in the Falcon, but much of the reason for SpaceX's success is because it doesn't optimise solely on the rocket science. They optimise for cost as a whole, and consider factors like design, manufacturing, operations, reusability, etc. to be relevant to the question of cost.

For example: the Falcon 9 would undoubtedly be more efficient if it had a hydrogen-based upper stage. But doing that would cause it to lose most of its commonality with the lower stage, requiring an entirely new design, manufacturing, and operations workforce. Which would cost several orders of magnitude more than the extra kerosene required to fly a "sub-optimal" rocket. The reason they've already cut the price of launch by about 80% vs. (say) the Space Shuttle is because they optimised the whole system, keeping the unique part count and operational complexity as low as possible.

I still sometimes hear old-school rocket scientists grumble about how the Falcon is a less optimised vehicle than the Shuttle, though. They just don't get it. Never will.

Anyhow, that was a tangent. Fascinating to think that wind turbines might be amenable to a similar class of disruption.