Reusable stages is very neat, but seems a little crazy to pay the tyranny of the rocket equation twice. I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.

Using modern technology, couldn't disposable first stages be produced much more cheaply than during the space race?

How much of modern manufacturing disposable booster's cost would be fuel vs metal?

I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit.

I recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.

It's not paying it twice. The rocket equation is about the ratio of the wet and dry mass, so for an expendable rocket you're always limited by the fact that there's an upper stage (and for the second stage the payload etc).

This is why SpaceX cares more about TWR for their engines than traditional rockets did. It goes from making a negligible difference to a huge component of how much fuel they need to keep for landing.

This seems a little confused.

The 23x more launches figure comes from HLS (Nasa sponsored mission to the moon). They may well change the configuration of that anyway, but if you want to refuel in orbit, that's what it costs. It's hard to get fuel to orbit (or any sort of payload). Previous Moon missions haven't refueled anything, but they couldn't return anything heavy from the moon's surface, the vehicle got smaller and smaller as it went and many parts were left behind, so it's not comparable. You can be sure if it's cheaper to somehow do this mission with expendable boosters, they'll think about doing that.

On a normal mission just to earth orbit, there is one booster and one starship, and reusing the booster is more a question of why not save some money for a little more propellant use? The reususable booster doesn't contribute much extra weight, it uses little propellant for boostback and landing.

The booster also doesn't go all the way and you need a booster if you're going to reach orbit (due to that equation), so it doesn't take much to make it reusable. So all in all, why not make it reusable if you can? What would you save from using expendable ones?

Fuel is so much cheaper than ships.

This claim doesn't make sense to me, you need most of the fuel to escape gravity. Coming back is almost free.

If the fuel (+ oxidizer) ends up costing as much as 1% of the cost of launching a conventional single-use rocket then the people behind it will be very happy. That means that their rocket (+ cost of ground facilities + all the people prepping the rocket and monitoring the launch) is very cheap.

The fuel (+ oxidizer) is basically free compared to all the other costs.

Those numbers don't make sense.

It doesn't take the same amount of fuel to land as it does to lift.

Speaking as a Kerbal Space program playing, internet commentor, It's probably <1% of the fuel to briefly counteract terminal velocity as it is to lift off and reach space.

That 23x number is trivially refuted simply by looking at the fact that this flight delivered 52 tons of cargo to orbit. Could a similarly sized expendable rocket like the Saturn V deliver 1196 tons?

How is it twice? Braking on the way down doesn't take nearly as much fuel as lift off so the "tyranny of the rocket equation" should be paid only once.

"I heard one person say that carrying fuel to land over the whole flight means it takes 23x more launches to get an equivalent payload to orbit."

I don't think that this is the case when using the atmosphere to shed most of your velocity, which is what we do when landing on Earth. Propulsive braking would be another story, but you can avoid that on bodies that do have some atmosphere. In our proximity, only the Moon and Mercury would need propulsive braking, but Moon's gravity is low and Mercury is hard to visit anyway.

That said, once you use the atmosphere to cushion what is basically a fall, the weight of the necessary heat shield comes to the equation too.

They use the atmosphere to brake, not fuel.

That's like saying we shouldn't reuse airplanes after one flight because you'd have to fly it 23 times to have it pay for that reuse.

That's still 1000x cheaper than... building a new airplane every flight.

And anyway those numbers area about moon missions, not low earth orbit.