It is stupid. It's borne from the highly unusual experience of the Shuttle. Shuttle operations were so complicated they required a standing army of engineers a

It is stupid. It's borne from the highly unusual experience of the Shuttle. Shuttle operations were so complicated they required a standing army of engineers and technicians just to keep the fleet operational and perform all the refurbishments in between flights. The cost of that standing army plus the limitations of flight rate imposed by the duration of refurbishment operations meant that ultimately every Shuttle flight ended up costing about $1.1 billion. Contrast that with the cost of building a new orbiter, which was around $2 billion. This was a huge problem for the Shuttle program from day one, because the huge ongoing costs meant that NASA manned spaceflight were locked into the Shuttle system and incapable of budgeting for developing improvements or alternatives. And indeed, they ended up stupidly flying more or less a prototype design for 3 decades. But that sort of insanity isn't a universal problem for reusability. Indeed, the idea that any sane entity outside of deeply entrenched government bureaucracy would embrace a "reusable" system where each flight cost 1/2 as much as brand new hardware is a bit of a stretch on its own. However, that's a problem which is not even remotely possible for SpaceX, because the cost of the vehicle is so much lower. SpaceX already manufactures reusable F9 first stages, they are just ordinary F9 first stages plus landing legs. They cost a few million dollars to produce, not billions, and SpaceX pumps out several of them a year. SpaceX is planning for a very low cost of operations for reusability. They'll land the stage, retrieve it with a vehicle, bring it into a warehouse where it can be run through some tests then assembled into a full launcher, fueled, and relaunched. There is a very low cap on the costs for that operation, because if it starts costing more than pumping out new stages then SpaceX will stop doing it. So there's no "trap" possible for SpaceX. If they get reusability working then they'll just have that much more manufacturing and R&D capacity plus profit margin for working on the next generation of rocket.