One needs to put success into perspective. Saturn V only launched a very small amount of times and had some near misses in that time. How successful it would ha

One needs to put success into perspective. Saturn V only launched a very small amount of times and had some near misses in that time. How successful it would have been if it had flown 100+ times is a question. Also, If you are not reusable you have much more margin to play with. SpaceX is optimizing this thing to an incredible amount. Liftoff thrust is 2x as much as Saturn V and they are aiming at 3x as much. Total payload to orbit is 2-3x larger while being reusable. SpaceX could have done what they did on Falcon 9 (200+ successful launches in a row) but Hot-Staging like the Soyuz is also successful. SpaceX optimizes for long term performance and operational simplicity. Ironically that leads to more Soviet way. The N1 would also have used hot staging.