A rocket that's thrown away was cheaper per flight than the shuttles, which were only partly discarded. It all depends on how much does it cost to build vs refurbish. Falcon 9 was designed to be easily refurbished and Ariane 6 was designed to be cheap to build. Also, launch campaign costs are not neglectable - moving the parts around, fueling, testing, and so on, are expensive.
Their next-gen ones should be reusable, and share a lot of design with the Falcon 9 family. Methalox might next, as it's very promising, but the RP1 supply chain is well established.
> A rocket that's thrown away was cheaper per flight than the shuttles, which were only partly discarded. It all depends on how much does it cost to build vs refurbish. Falcon 9 was designed to be easily refurbished and Ariane 6 was designed to be cheap to build.
It's not just that the Shuttle was expensive to refurbish. It was also very expensive to build.
Whereas Falcon 9 is much less expensive to build new than Ariane 6.
Ariane 6 was designed to be cheaper to build (cheaper than Ariane 5, that is).
>Whereas Falcon 9 is much less expensive to build new than Ariane 6.
For context, my understanding is that SpaceX builds one new Falcon 9 upper stage (not reused) every day. I doubt there is another entity on earth building a new rocket every month.
SpaceX has a large fleet of Falcon 9 reusable boosters, but still needs to build one every now and then.
> For context, my understanding is that SpaceX builds one new Falcon 9 upper stage (not reused) every day.
Probably not quite that often. They're aiming to launch ~150 this year (although with the recent RUD, that'll be pretty tough). But yeah - 1 every other day is still very impressive.
Their next-gen ones should be reusable, and share a lot of design with the Falcon 9 family. Methalox might next, as it's very promising, but the RP1 supply chain is well established.