economy
Reusable rockets have transformed the economics of spaceflight, and the price to send one kilogram into orbit has fallen dramatically over the past two decades.
The biggest driver of falling launch costs has been reusing rocket boosters instead of discarding them after one flight, since recovering and reflying the same expensive hardware spreads its total cost across many missions rather than building an entirely new rocket for every single launch. This dramatically slashed the price per kilogram of sending payloads into orbit compared to the fully expendable rockets that dominated spaceflight for decades.
Switching rocket bodies from metal to wood is not a real or practical aerospace engineering approach, since wood cannot withstand the extreme heat, stress, and pressure of rocket launches. Launching only at night to save on fuel is also not an actual cost-reduction strategy used in the industry.
Cheaper launch costs enabled by reusability have, in turn, made entirely new business models financially viable, including massive satellite megaconstellations that would have been far too expensive to deploy under the old cost structure of fully disposable rockets.
economy
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