Not to mention that making the upper stage and payload fairing much bigger and heavier juat so you can recover them is not an automatic win. You can recover it, but you’ve also made it much more expensive in the first place. And the booster needs to be bigger, heavier and more expensive, too.

It’s not an automatic deal breaker, of course. Falcon 9 is obviously a promising success. But Starship is also working with some new challenges that Falcon 9 didn’t have to worry about.

Many of these stem from design compromises that were forced by Starship’s secondary goal of being capable of a trip to Mars. In that respect, it very much resembles another major project to produce a heavy launch vehicle with a reusable combination payload fairing and upper stage that is also capable of carrying a human crew: the Space Shuttle.