The quote may make sense, but it's still moved the goalpost. > when one of the SpaceX boosters will have flown 100 times with between flights maintenance at an

The quote may make sense, but it's still moved the goalpost. > when one of the SpaceX boosters will have flown 100 times with between flights maintenance at an economical level, then it will be an actual success The hope is that the boosters will be able to be reused indefinitely (stated goal of 10+ for block 5 I think?) but they only need to be economical to refly once and they will be successful. There is some argument that they need to refly multiple times in order to recoup development costs, but the reality is that they are already cheaper than the competition on expendable flights. We know it's already economical, because as stated in parent they have flown reused boosters at a discount. The concern you quote above is that reused boosters are somehow more likely to fail, but the best indicator that a booster can fly is if it has already flown before. Recovering the boosters has allowed the effect of stresses during flight to be measured, and we have seen them make design modifications in response. It's plausible that this has already improved reliability of all boosters, but more importantly it means that the boosters that have been reflown (or ones like them) have been heavily investigated. Of course everyone knows that reused boosters need to be dependable, the fact that they're being reflown means that the engineers are at least reasonably confident that they're not going to blow up with the payload on top. Even if a reused booster blew up, you would need to identify that something about it being reused was at fault. If you did, and were not able to fix that issue for some reason, we still have the situation that the boosters are already cheaper in expendable mode than the competition.