>They will have to learn to do it by themselves.

True, and I didn't otherwise. But SpaceX was extremely opened about many of the issues that Falcon 9 had.

>SpaceX has no reason to go slow with Starship.

Again, SpaceX has massive reasons to delay customers. They need the first several launches themselves with Starlink. That matters more to them than getting customers on Starship. And they need to focus on reusability first, which may mean many changes. Those changes have a chance to cause a flight failure. SpaceX would absolutely want to avoid damaging a customer payload. Not putting on customer payloads allows them to make more risky changes.

>Customers also don't care much about reuse at first, only for their payload to go to orbit, as they didn't care with F9 landing attempts.

They care about reliability. Period. Starship has none at the moment. That won't be the case for long, but a single failure would push customers back for a long time.

Plus why would any customers choose Starship over F9 right now? If Starship is more expensive per flight, they are choose F9. Starship won't be cheaper until it starts rapid reusable flights. The only other reason why someone would choose Starship is payload capacity. And if they are building something that big, they wouldn't have gone with RL anyways.

>Or Rocket Lab may move slower than expected, since even from first successful landing to reuse it took SpaceX 2 years time... And Starship can go a lot faster since its design has lessons learned from F9 landings and reuse.

RL could go slower and SS faster. However, that is unlikely. It took F9 two years as SpaceX was still learning to fly altogether. RL isn't going through the same issue. And again, RL has the ability to see the failures that F9 ran into to avoid the same. SS is trying to achieve something never before done. They will hit issues and delays. That's perfectly fine. SpaceX understands and accepts that.

One final thing, SpaceX has no reason to rush faster on Starship as there is no competition. Rocket Lab is not competing with Starship and never will. They will take the scraps that fall off the table once Starship hits it's goals. Starlink alone is liking to make more profit this year than Rocket Lab. And it isn't even at 1/10th it's final goal.

Try to keep that in perspective. SpaceX won't be making a push for customers for Starship as it simply has no reason to.

Landing a booster from an orbital rocket is a greater challenge than a sub-orbital rocket, but not insanely so. SpaceX took time to figure out how to do it because they were trying many different methods and they were trying to do the R&D extremely cheaply. And it worked. Today we have the benefit of hindsight, and companies like Rocket Lab have the benefit of being able to follow in SpaceX's footsteps, without having to steal their confidential trade secrets. Some lessons on the process are publicly known, such as the use of an entry burn to moderate speed, and so on. Some lessons are actually publicly available data because NASA commissioned SpaceX to gather data on supersonic retropropulsion to inform future Mars landings. SpaceX's "secret sauce" has never been trade secrets, it's always been it's ability to execute operationally and get things done.

Additionally, Neutron is attempting an easier flight profile than Falcon 9, it's not doing barge landings and instead focusing solely on returning to the launch site. SpaceX succeeded with their first ever attempt at an RTLS landing, which was their first successful landing overall, and their success rate for ground landings was very high (100% in fact) even while they were improving the reliability of drone ship landings. It's just an easier and simpler flight profile. But it requires you design the rocket from the get go with that in mind (because you need enough performance margin), which Neutron and Starship have been.

SpaceX may be able to get things done, but Starship is a tremendous amount to bite off all at once. The launch tower is different, the landing profiles are different, there is upper stage atmospheric re-entry and controlled descent, there is upper stage landing, there is the thermal protective system on the upper stage, there is orbital propellant transfer, and on and on and on. Getting all of these things working is required in order to meet their Artemis Program Starship-HLS commitments. Without those commitments it's possible that Starship could see commercial service in a sort of "early access" mode where they were still working on upper stage landings and reuse, but because of the Starship-HLS contract it's very likely that'll be a secondary priority.

I'm not sure why people have this idea that Starship is going to be easy or why Neutron is going to be hard. Neutron vs. Starship are just fundamentally different things. Neutron is a much shorter race to "run" compared to Starship, it's a sprint vs. a marathon. Even if SpaceX is much faster at working through Starship design and development issues than Rocket Lab is with Neutron they just have much, much longer to go.

They aren't going to be launching with a reduced configuration unless reuse attempts go very wrong. They will launch relatively cheaply, because some revenue is better than none, but only with configurations that are potentially reusable so they can get reuse perfected.