Like the Space Shuttle.
Space Shuttle Budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget
Falcon 9 costs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Pricing
Not directly comparable but still show a large improvement in efficiency.
Reused booster ruptured under improper launch criteria revised for management and public relations reasons.
Would it have been okay if it weren’t for the wrong go? Maybe, but still the potato quality refurbishment of flown boosters could have done it sooner or later.
Edit: This one is better: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/17321/did-the-chal...
The boosters were technically reusable, but refurbishing them after the corrosive bath they've taken by their landing in the ocean was much more expensive than making new ones from scratch.
You'll note that SpaceX lands their rockets on a barge, instead of landing them on water and fishing them out later - that's because they want to keep the salt water out of the rocket.
But I think _you're_ referring to the SRBs.
In both cases (SSME and SRB) they were re-used in some fashion, though I agree the SRB re-use was not a good solution.
I thought you meant SRBs because they too were advertised as reusable, even though in practice, they weren't.
Also unlike the Space Shuttle, the 5 boosters did all the orbital boosting, Buran only had small orbital correction engines on board (like Shuttle OMS), all big engines were down on the boosters.
Total cost of Space Shuttle program (in 2000 cost mind you) was $200B for 134 launches, or $1.5B each.
And an expendable Falcon launch actually can put nearly as much payload into LEO by weight as the Shuttle, and costs around $45M (priced $63M).
Shuttle had an advantage since the orbiter was both first and second stages.
The orange fuel tank was lost on each mission, and the solid rocket boosters were recovered and refurbished after a swim in the ocean.
So by some measures the Shuttle system was very reusable, but the complexities of the system resulted in high costs to tear down, inspect, and refurbish between flights.
It would have been cheaper to build new ones.
My understanding is that refurbishment meant basically stripping them for parts and using them to build new boosters, but still a significant amount of percentage re-use of parts.
It just highlights how important the amount of type of required refurbishment is to making re-usability actually practical. Falcon 9 is noteworthy because it's relatively inexpensive up-front compared to traditional boosters, relatively simple in design and part count (compared to STS) and relatively quick and inexpensive to re-use.
Something that's often overlooked here is how extensive the required refurbishment is.
The "reusable" shuttle boosters and orbiter engines took substantial time (https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/584723main_Wings-ch... says 4-5 months), money, and labor to get ready for the next launch. SpaceX is still making noise about trying out a same-day reflight sometime soon; it's clearly a much less involved process.