Comment by sebzim4500
2 days ago
This was the argument a decade ago when SpaceX was the only one seriously talking about reuse. Given SpaceX is now responsible for the vast majoriy of mass to orbit it is hard to argue with the results, and now everyone serious is investing in reuse.
this is survivorship bias. SpaceX made a choice, and it succeeded; but SpaceX also made a million other design choices. Reusability could well be sub-optimal.
Your argument seems logical but the conclusion is wild, and I’m pretty sure extremely wrong. What other design choices, SpaceX made have been more significant for capturing 70% of all rocket launches in the world?
Reusing seems like the obvious and biggest design decision that led to their success
The biggest thing? It’s the leadership. The leadership and the culture has more impact on any individual technical decision. If Elon Musk has decided to go for super cheapo nonreusable rockets, they still would have 70% market share, but the whole market would look different.
Note that SpaceX's whole schtick at the beginning was to specifically go for a very cheap single use rocket. All of their design decisions were based around making the Flacon 1 and later the Falcon 9 easy to mass produce. This was the prevailing philosophy after the Space Shuttle's reusability failed to bring down launch costs. SpaceX tried that and they failed to achieve the cost savings they wanted. That's when they pivoted to reusability, which did work, propelling them from well branded newcomer to dominant player in the launch market.
For SpaceX to keep up their current launch cadence without reusability, they would need to build a new Falcon 9 booster every 2-3 days instead of every two months. It would also require an 8x increase in their build rate of Merlin engines.