That’s why Elon’s in it with Starlink. From Elon’s perspective, if Starlink merely breaks even, it will be more than worth it as it has drastically increased launch demand, enabling high flight rate reusable rockets.
Not just increased launch demand, Starlink launches serve SpaceX as a testbed for reusability and refurbishment techniques they want to experiment on themselves without risking customer hardware.
For example, they intentionally swap hardware components between reflown boosters to better understand their behavior after multiple reuses, to the point they have individual modules that have flown more times than the current maximum number of reuses of any booster as a whole (currently at 9).
Another example, they've stopped having static fires for flight proven boosters first for Starlink, then for customer payloads too, unless the customer explicitly requests it.
It's unbelievable that "flight proven booster" turned out to be really what it says on the tin, and not just a piece of marketing speak.
> It's unbelievable that "flight proven buster" turned out to be really what it says on the tin, and not just a piece of marketing speak.
That's a thing to love about SpaceX. When they first started using this phrase, it was tongue-in-cheek in a pretty obvious way. Three years later, it was no longer a joke.
