I really, really shoupd have kept that study offline somewhere...

Back the day, before SpaceX came along a serious launch provider, ESA conducted a study on the financial viability of reuseable rockets. The conclusion was, that they are viabke, technically feasible but only financially interestung with a number of launches per year for which there was no demand.

SpaceX for sure is launching a lot of their own Starlink satellites...

SpaceX first landed rocket on Dec, 2015. Then people were like: ok, you landed, let's see if it will fly or has any economical impact.

Sure, now no-one questions whether landing a rocket is possible at all and whether it is worth it.

Tbf, i was working at one at the time. Finding the space in the chassis for the battery and adapting it and suspension to the weight of an EV meant they had to develop platforms for EV nearly from scratch.

Without any idea of the market demand. At the current cost of developing new Platforms (a few billions), you could understand being risk adverse. Low sales would have killed the whole companies.

That's not ridiculous the Space shuttle is the proof that reusable can be tricky… however for falcon 9 there is few doubt that it must be cheaper.

There is a mathematical equation, a function of variables, on whether the reuse business case closes. The variables are, off the top of my head (I might have missed some) the base carrying cost of all the people necessary to run the space-ship factory, the incremental cost of refurbishing the rocket and the incremental cost of building a new one, plus the overhead both in payload and engineering effort to get that reusability. The result of the equation is how many flights per year is necessary for re-usability to pay off.

So for the Space Shuttle reusability did not pay off, because it had a low flight rate and a very high cost of refurbishment (the Solid Rocket Boosters in particular probably never paid off- due to the landing into the ocean and the salt-water dunking they had to be fully taken apart after every flight, inspected, and put back together, and that meant that you actually had labor costs of twice the work of just assembling a new one- the materials cost savings was simply not worth that). This is one reason that SpaceX ended up abandoning their original plan of recovering engines from the ocean, though they were trying to do it much harder with liquid fuel engines rather than the simple solids that STS used.

One interesting thing about SpaceX (a privately held company, which does not publish useful financials) is that they have also claimed they invested a lot into the factory for churning out engines with many fewer man-hours than their western competitors. That investment might not make sense if you are counting on reusing all your engines many times before they are replaced- unless you are looking at many many launches of Falcon Heavy, which I will be curious to see if they actually do (the market for super heavy rockets like that has never really existed at more than 5ish a year, and I'm personally uncertain if satellite internet can get there).

Before SpaceX came along, the (Russian) Progress company was the cheapest in the world, with their R7 Semyorka (Soyuz 2 is the modern version) rocket family. That was because the Soviet Union had invested in a very heavily automated, highly productive launch factory (they launched a bucket-dropping spy satellite every two weeks, plus manned launches, Progress resupply flights, Molniya commsats, etc. so they had a very high flight rate) that needed very little in the way of manpower to make their engines and rockets- and that investment definitely paid off, the R-7 family has flown into space more than any other rocket in human history. But making it reusable and investing heavily in highly automated production tend to cut against each other as solutions to the cost problem until you get to extremely high flight rates.

Whether you think that at current flight rates the numbers point to re-usability comes down to how much you trust Musk the businessman (personally not very much), and how much you trust Shotwell to manage Musk and bring the company to a good place in spite of Musk's random perturbations (personally I have great faith in Gwynne, but your mileage may vary).