That there are more than enough articles about why SpaceX does thing the way they do and Arianespace/Airbus and other companies doing things differently are sure nonsense.
Can we please act even more fanboyish about fucking rockets?
fanboy? I'm not the one making assertions based on nothing.
First of all you claim Ariane 6 will cost 1M/flight. I'm not going to even try to refute that for obvious reasons. Not to mention that Adeline is just a concept, no serious efforts are being put into its development because is a stupid idea. A marketing stunt pulled by Airbus trying to grab attention when they realized SpaceX was close to landing a rocket, and make reusability something feasible.
ULA is in the same position, they have a new rocket "Vulcan" which is still 4 years away and today we already know it will not be competitive with SpaceX in some segments of the market (LEO and under 6T payload GTO). So they unveiled a plan to recover the engines, and make them reusable. As happens with Airbus, this plan came just when they too realized that SpaceX was close to achieving their goals. ULA has already stated that they do not plan to recover their engines until 2023/24 at earliest.
So yeah, i'm pretty aware about what other companies are doing. The only one with a serious plan is Blue Origin, with tested hardware. No concepts, no beautiful CGIs, no powerpoints, real rockets and engines.
ULA and Airbus are in a very difficult position, not only their currents rockets are way more expensive than Falcon9/Heavy, but also the ones they are developing. They still beat SpaceX in capacity and reliability, but with Falcon Heavy around the corner and SpaceX closing major design changes later this year with Block5 that gap may fill up pretty quickly.
Secondly, you affirm there is no money to be made on reusability because human labor cost are going to eat up the margin. The simple truth is you don't know that, you don't know how many people worked on the Core 1021 or their salaries. We only know that took 4 months and that no major parts of the core were changed (same engines, sayou me fuel tanks). According to a reddit user who claims to have been an intern working on the reused core they added new components, as the core was built in 2015 and the design of the F9 had changed since then. The only thing we know is that SES got a discount of about 10%, probably between 6-7 million.
So yeah, I'm pretty sure you are talking nonsense.
Can you post any of these articles?
I'm not sure about what articles he is talking about but i can give you some info about both approaches.
Basically we have two plans to achieve reusability:
1. Full first stage recovery
SpaceX:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYmQQn_ZSys
Blue Origin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTEhohh6eYk ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pillaOxGCo
Pros:
- Recover the full stage (Engine + Fuel Tank + Avionics), around 60-70% of the total cost of the rocket.
Cons:
- You need to sacrifice capacity to orbit, as you need to save fuel to return the stage to the earth and land it.
2. Engines recovery
ULA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lftGq6QVFFI
AIRBUS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV29pEvZvZw
Pros:
- No need to sacrifice payload capacity.
Cons
- You only recover the engines, the fuel tanks and other components are lost. Cost saving reduced to 50-60% of the total rocket cost.