Rapidly reusable means the goal is to have Starship (or at the very least the Super Heavy booster) fly multiple times a day. The Space Shuttle needed a new exte

Rapidly reusable means the goal is to have Starship (or at the very least the Super Heavy booster) fly multiple times a day. The Space Shuttle needed a new external fuel tank each flight, and the SRBs required significant refurbishment, to say nothing of the orbiter's own refurbishment. Also important to note that Starship is going to be an interplanetary vehicle. And that means it needs to be able to land in places with little to no atmosphere on a surface with no runway. The Space Shuttle was an impressive engineering marvel, especially for the time, but even if it could leave low earth orbit, there was no way it could land anywhere other than Earth.