[marsokod]

Hopefully false, and you need to increase that number to at least 20, more likely 30 to pay for the investment. That is very the problem lies - the risk.

Looking at the spaceflight calendar for the rest of the year, there are 6 flights where Ariane 5 could used, if you exclude all the national missions from non-EU countries. Let's round that to 10 as this does not cover all the remaining launches. So we are at a possible market of ~20 launches a year, with the current cheap prices of SpaceX. In order to justify reusability, Arianespace/Airbus would need to plan on having a 90/100% marketshare of the very competitive market, while their US competitors could benefit from quite lucrative military missions.