There's the rub: 3D printing is actually more expensive for fabrication than conventional manufacturing if you're making dozens of things, and if you're making

There's the rub: 3D printing is actually more expensive for fabrication than conventional manufacturing if you're making dozens of things, and if you're making hundreds, it's painfully obvious that conventional manufacturing is cheaper. 3D printing buys you faster iteration and design freedom. It's also convenient for making a regeneratively cooled rocket engine (which makes reusable launch easier, by the way!). Making a rocket a little bit bigger to enable reuse is not actually that expensive. Costs don't scale linearly with rocket payload, so making it larger has a smaller marginal cost than you might think. Besides, now you ALSO have a larger rocket that you can fly in expendable mode if you need to. So if anything, 3D printing allows you to do reuse, as it allows you to still afford making a small number of vehicles per year with similar per-unit fabrication costs as if you were making a large number. But because each airframe can be used multiple times, you can do just as many flights per year as if you invested in a large conventional tooling capability but at a much lower cost. The near-utter-lack of reusable smallsat launchers is baffling to me. Especially now that reuse is effectively proven.