My take on the rationale behind Christophe Bonnal's statement: If you have a market for 400 engines a year and build 400 engines a year, you will get good at b

My take on the rationale behind Christophe Bonnal's statement: If you have a market for 400 engines a year and build 400 engines a year, you will get good at building engines and you will have a lot of opportunity to improve your ability to build all those engines. If you have a market of 400 engines a year but reuse each engine 40 times, your build rate will converge on building 10 new engines a year. Once your initial production is done and you are in the sustaining level, you will be back in the boat of all the other rocket companies that are only building ~10 engines a year. The inference is that 10 engines a year doesn't give you the volume to sustain (and refine) your low cost build process. Where I think the argument goes wrong the worst is that Christophe Bonnal is mapping traditional rocket making experience - low rate production of very complex, very expensive hardware - onto SpaceX. SpaceX is rewriting the rules. They appear to have rewritten the rules on the cost of expendable rockets and, with reuse, will rewrite those rules again. That should rewrite the rules on the number of launches since they will be much more affordable. The (counter) premise is that dropping prices of reusable rockets will allow more launches which will absorb what would otherwise be excess SpaceX rocket building capacity.