This reminds me of reading about the launch of the HMS Dreadnought in 1906. The Dreadnought was a revolutionary battleship: a turbine engine made it faster than any other battleship, and it had all 12-inch guns (instead of a wasteful mix of small and large guns).
It was so clearly superior to all other battleships that the name "dreadnought" become a generic name for a modern battleship.
But here's the thing: navies around the world resisted building their own dreadnoughts. If you've spent your military treasure on pre-dreadnought battleships, how do you explain to citizens that they're all obsolete and you need to start from scratch?
And so it is with reusable rockets. In 2018, Alain Charmeau, an ArianeSpace exec, said that re-usable rockets make no sense because, "Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year!" And that would be bad because what do you do with the employees? [1]
At the risk of beating a dead horse: In 2018, Starship was not even fully designed (later that year they switched to stainless steel instead of carbon-composite).
Yet Starship managed to fly into orbit and re-enter successfully before Ariane 6 flew even once.
>later that year they switched to stainless steel instead of carbon-composite
A decision which, according to Isaacson's Elon Musk, Musk insisted on against considerable opposition from his engineers. One more point against the frequent claim that Musk isn't a "real" engineer/doesn't really do anything at SpaceX.
It was so clearly superior to all other battleships that the name "dreadnought" become a generic name for a modern battleship.
But here's the thing: navies around the world resisted building their own dreadnoughts. If you've spent your military treasure on pre-dreadnought battleships, how do you explain to citizens that they're all obsolete and you need to start from scratch?
And so it is with reusable rockets. In 2018, Alain Charmeau, an ArianeSpace exec, said that re-usable rockets make no sense because, "Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year!" And that would be bad because what do you do with the employees? [1]
This is classic sunk-cost fallacy.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...