/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15250091
>>15250942
Both the marginal cost and the total cost per engine will generally decrease as you build more, so reusing engines does in fact increase cost per engine. It's insane to suggest that reusable falcon is not as profitable though, that would require a negative marginal cost. I don't know what math that anon tried to do, but it's wrong. I would guess he tried to calculate the marginal cost to SpaceX to build 150th Block 5 Falcon 9 and then assumed that marginal cost was equal to the cost of each rocket, which obviously is not the case. Your fixed cost + the marginal cost for 18 boosters is identical regardless if you reuse or not. In the second case, the marginal cost per booster will be much lower, and the total cost per booster will significantly decrease as your fixed costs become a lower portion of the whole. Either way, building more boosters incures more costs and is more expensive, even if the marginal cost per booster decreases. They also couldn't hit the current cadence with their current production capacity so expendable F9s would also have substantially higher fixed costs. SpaceX most likely employs dozens of people with assorted PhDs in economics, process engineering, and a smattering of other fields whose sole job is to maximize profit per rocket, some random dumbfuck did not figure out how to make SpaceX more profitable by simply expending rockets.

tl;dr Just break windows, make infinite profit with this one easy trick, economists hate him.