Chinese rockets companies are evolving at insane pace, including RLVs. A couple of big milestones have been achieved this year alone, like first stage landing.

I certainly hope ‘economically viable’ includes properly priced externalities for e.g. side effects of burning hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of aluminium and other materials in the high atmosphere.

That's the fun part, they don't need to be viable. It's just the excuse to shovel tons of money to Trump donors, by rerunning the scam that was SDI.

And they never will be because it's always going to be cheaper to build them on the ground.