[kovvy]

Reusability increases costs if you don't reuse often enough.

The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.

Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.

[jondiggsit]

I’ve read that a shuttle refit after landing was so expensive and time consuming to render it useless…. Feel free to correct if wrong.

[e_y_]

The turnaround time for Shuttle was 2-3 months, while building a brand new rocket takes like 1-2 years. Although for the cost of Shuttle, we could have built a whole bunch of expendable rockets, pipelined with a regular launch cadence, and probably also gotten some cost savings through economies of scale.

[pfdietz]

And, the market projections that indicated there would be enough payloads for large amounts of launches were also basically fraudulent.