| It's worth noting that when George Sowers and ULA did their well-known business case analysis for re-use (nearly 10 years ago, in 2015), their analysis concluded that it would take 10 flights to pay-off the penalty of re-use. The analysis was flawed from the start, because it falsely assumed you could charge for every kg of capacity, but in reality customers are largely paying by flight, and much of the Falcon 9 capacity is unused. But even according to their flawed analysis, they assumed there would never be a need for so many flights, and re-use would just eat into their production line productivity, raising the cost of each rocket. These false assumptions caused them not to pursue any real type of reusabilty. Though they proposed a janky system where the engines would be recovered by parachute and helicopter, they never funded it, and the current Vulcan doesn't support any type of reuse. Flash forward to today, and ULA has a contract for possibly 83 launches from Amazon for Kuiper. What a terrible lack of foresight. |
But Falcon 9 seems to cost $40-60 million and carries 200 tons of RP-1 which seems to cost $200-500k, and all other costs should either be small or removable by automation, so the reusable part is actually up to 98-99%, not 30%.
Of course if you just flush boatloads of money down the drain for each launch for no reason, reusing the booster doesn't change much.
Also in general that sort of mathematical modelling is usually worse than useless since the output is usually a straightforward function of the assumptions and the model just makes bullshit assumptions seem more legitimate.