[JumpCrisscross]

> you're aware that the space shuttle was "reusable" though, right?

Shuttle was reüsable on paper. It couldn’t unlock high-cadence launch because it was not built on an assembly line and had long, manual and error-prone refurbishment requirements.

Put practically, one couldn’t build a LEO constellation like Starlink or aim for in-orbit refuelling with the Shuttle. One can do the former with Falcon 9. One can attempt the latter with Starship.

[ffsm8]

I don't disagree, after all, the shuttles booster was(at least to my knowledge) more expensive them the reusable shuttle, but that's once again a qualifier to the statement that - without that qualifier, does continue to point to the shuttle.

[JumpCrisscross]

> without that qualifier, does continue to point to the shuttle

The qualifier is only semantically meaningful. The engineering benefits one gets from reusability--low costs and high cadence--weren't there for the Space Shuttle.