Rockets are designed to have a vastly lower margin of safety. If they never fail in testing that’s a sign you’re over engineering it and sacrificing cargo capacity, which is a bad thing. That said, these failures should be uncommon.
That's basically been the conventional thinking about rocketry historically - scientists and engineers looked at the tyranny of the rocket equation and choose to maximize payload per launch because they were largely funded by government or quasi government "cost plus" types of contracts. The design philosophy of working close to margins comes from this thinking.
SpaceX's greatest contribution has been to look at rocketry from the point of view of economics of running a rocket launching business as opposed to a "per launch cost plus" model realizing that fuel cost for launching a rocket is close to trivial compared to the facrication cost of making a rocket.
So their entire design philosophy is around reusability and reusability seems to push costs down low enough that you can get more payload up by simply doing more launches. While SpaceX is famous for not filing patents and instead protecting their IP using the trade secret approach and fabricating everything in-house, you can bet they'll be operating with more engineering headroom to get reliability and reusability.
Evidence for their bet having been right is the fact that they have grabbed virtually 100% of commercial and quasi-governmental launches and some part of US government launches. Other players in this space now almost entirely depend on defence contracts or national prestige contracts to survive.
Doesn't matter. If you take the conservative assumptions that go into manufacturing, say, a car and apply those to a rocket, you'll get something that won't even lift off the ground, much less make orbit.
Any rocket HAS to be very close to the limits of what materials used allow, and not the +50% margin of error you routinely seen in other fields. What you say about SpaceX is true, but only relative to the rocket industry as a whole. E.g. SpaceX uses cheap, available materials and simple designs over exotic composites and complex mechanisms. But they still operate close to the margins, as they have to in order to have any payload capacity at all. In fact, the move to steel probably reduced their mass margins even further.
Starship needs to be reusable dozens of times, with no refit between launches (only refueling). Fuel is cheap; the vehicle needs to survive. It also needs to be reliable enough to carry people. They're not using razor-thin safety margins on it.
SpaceX has built part of their business around the idea that it's worth trading a moderate amount of payload for re-usability as long as they can still reach the orbit their customers care about and it was considered an extremely risky bet before they made it routine.
It doesn't make fuel cheap, let alone very cheap.
Actually another significant part of SpaceX business is modern engineering and modern mean of production. They used to launch without recoverability for some high orbit payloads and they were competitively priced for that too.
Yeah, and with much higher required dv and more required stages this would be a huge problem. But we only need two stages to orbit when launching from Earth, so it's really not that big of a deal, and it turns out that optimizing for reusability ends up being a lot cheaper than optimizing for minimum fuel use. For example, it only costs $200k for a fuel load of Falcon 9 fuel. If you got rid of reusability you'd need less fuel and could save tens of thousands of dollars ... but at the cost of needing to build a new $54M spacecraft with each launch. Clearly that trade-off isn't worth it.
Fuel becomes more expensive on reusable spacecraft. Granted, the first pound of fuel is cheap, but the costs keep rising.
With one and done you have a larger mass fraction to work with. Reusable spacecraft operate on much tighter constraints. Every single wasted pound in Space X’s design likely costs them 100’s of thousands of dollars in lost profit over time.
Not sure what’s to disagree with about that: “The reusable Falcon 9’s performance to GTO is listed at 5,500 kilograms. The same rocket in fully expendable version can lift 50 percent more payload — 8,300 kilograms. For the Falcon Heavy, the performance to GEO is about 2.8x that of the reusable version” https://spacenews.com/spacexs-new-price-chart-illustrates-pe...
Reusable means cost savings, but it has a dramatic reduction in cargo capacity. This means more trips to get the same mass into orbit, which means mire fuel directly used and every extra lb in the design is then carried up multiple times while further requiring more trips.
That’s great if you’re transporting large numbers of the same thing like star link satellites. However, many payloads are worth sacrificing the first stage. Just look through the “No attempt“ missions in 2018 for some of the reasons why: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_...
Which again demonstrates reusability is really expensive, though clearly not always as expensive as a new rocket.
Many of the "no attempt" 2018 missions were because they were reflights of older models of cores (pre-Block 5) that weren't worth keeping around. Expendable launches for Block 5 boosters are far less common.
Right, if you can throw away an obsolete rocket stage as part of profitably launching a much bigger load than you would have done with a re-usable one, it's hard to justify not doing it, and just selling it for scrap instead.
They are also removing new rockets. SpaceX is simply going to prioritize older ones for destruction assuming they can handle the payload.
Remember while the first stage is significantly more valuable, it's not just a question of fuel the upper stage is destroyed with both approaches. So, combined with significantly lower payloads the cost per kg does not drop as much as you might think.
