Comment by marze

8 hours ago

Against the cost of a lower payload fraction. Say you get 4% with TSTO, 2% with SSTO. And if you run into trouble with the design, the SSTO payload moves towards 0%. Your operational savings need to compensate for a doubling of cost per unit mass payload, possibly much more.

And even though full reusability is much easier with two stages, and has not been achieved yet.