>>14053692These things became true after F9 had done a hundred launches anon. A lot of successful rockets never even launch that much in their whole career.
Falcon 9 needed a lot of launches to become economically viable, and consequently it needed a big launch market, which is part of why oldspace didn't really see re-usability as economically viable, particularly in the post cold war glut.
One purpose of Starlink for example is to effectively expand the launch market for SpaceX, it's a big part of Starlink 2 as well for Starship.
For a long while SpaceX would have been operating without having recovered their initial investments using Falcon, if they did not have as much capital, they *could* have gone bankrupt.
If the government had not supported them with commercial crew, they *could* have gone bankrupt.
If falcon 9 had been less reliable to start with, they *could* have gone bankrupt.
This is all true again moving on to Starship, it's why Elon worries about the reliability and the cost of the raptor.
If Starship cannot be reliable enough, it will take much longer to pay for it's own startup costs, let alone be economical for Elon's Mars ambitions.
Every million dollars spent building new starships is another million dollars of profit that needs to be earned to cover Starships development.
