You are directly repeating the propaganda Arianespace and Russia has been pushing about SpaceX since the beginning. I would honestly advice you to rethink this before repeating stuff that is pushed by lots of Russian government channels.

First of all, you are applying a total double standard. If you want to honestly analyses you need to look at all rockets and the amount of commercial support.

If you are actually interest in the history, you will see that SpaceX got some money for ISS servicing. This money was conditional on flying lots of time, and they had to win the contract against a whole host of competitors. However this amount of money, was tiny compared to the development cost of say an Ariane 5 or Ariane 6.

> Rocket technology hasn't really changed in decades.

This depends on what you mean by 'changed'. Depending on how you look at it a lot has changed, another way of looking at it nothing has.

You could make the argument we are still using lithium batteries today, so nothing has changed since the 90s, but that would be a terrible argument.

And so it is for rockets, there clearly have been advancements that have changed the industry fundamentally since the 90s.

> Reusability is not a panacea. It increases complexity, decreases safety and much of the cost savings are mitigated by the fact that you have to carry extra fuel for the return back (thereby cutting into the amount of payload you can carry).

This is true. But again, please actually look at history. SpaceX started taking the majority of contracts BEFORE re-usability was a factor, before SpaceX had human space launches, or even DoD launches.

SpaceX Falcon 9 was taking the majority of launch contracts simply based on rocket design and production. During this time they did not get any money from government for development and yet the improved the rocket every single year by a substantial amount.

They developed re-usability themselves and thus were able to fly even more rockets. And pretty much every expert not paid by the Russian government has now admitted that re-usabiltiy is actually worth if for SpaceX.

The fuel cost doesn't matter that much if your rocket is big enough to carry the required payload that the market demands. Often it would be hard to sell that extra payload to costumers anyway. It is simply false to say 'most of the savings are mitigated by fuel', this is simply not true. The construction of the booster cost 30 million, and its insane to argue that it is not worth it for them to recover that.

Safety is not increased, as both very conservative NASA and DoD certification programs have shown. Reusable boosters have a 100% perfect flight record so far. Reusable boosters are certified for both human and the most expensive scientific missions.

> The space shuttle was reusable and yet, it is generally seen as a disappointment

The Shuttle was partially reusable. Remember that gigantic orange tank? Yeah, that was thrown away. Solid can not really be reused as the cost is in the fuel manufacture. The Shuttle reused the 'box' of the solid boosters but basically replaced almost all of it.

> (and I don't believe for a second SpaceX engineers are better than NASA engineers).

This is just another terrible argument, where I don't even know where to start its so bad.

SpaceX Falcon 9 booster reuse and Shuttle reuse are totally different concept. Shuttle is a second stage, orbital human capable vehicle. The Falcon 9 booster flies only a couple 100km into the ocean and then lands.

Also, the Falcon 9 re-usability was designed in the year 2010-2019. They used modern tools, and used 10s of iterations, and multiple times evolved and adjusted the design.

NASA engineers (actually contractors for the most part) had to basically figure out something that is much harder (second stage reuse) with 1960 technology and basically get it correct on the first try.

You are simply creating false equivalency.

Even so, nobody in the world today would deny that SpaceX had the best rocket building team in the world. They have top people vertically integrated from valves to structures, to engines. I don't think even NASA engineers working on SLS would deny that SpaceX has the best overall rocket team in the world.