Europe's Answer to Starship
The quote that sums up the article (and the study it discusses):
>In comparison, Starship is more than three times heavier than the RLV C5 at launch. A significant portion of that mass is the cost of full reusability: heat shield tiles, landing fuel, structural reinforcements, the wings. Of every tonne Starship sends to orbit, only around 40% is payload however the RLV C5, with its simpler partially reusable approach, manages to put 74% of its mass-to-orbit into useful payload. What it lacks in raw capacity it gains in efficiency.
The article, the study, and (apparently) European policymakers, cannot wrap their heads around the fact that Starship—manufacturing, launch infrastructure, and launch cadence—is being developed as a system, a conveyor belt to orbit. So, the entire basis of their analysis is between vehicles (one of which is theoretical) and the one metric they can point to as better—percentage of mass-to-orbit—is meaningless.
Governments and companies care about time, cost, reliability, and payload capacity. This theoretical European launch vehicle, being partially reusable and fueled with hydrolox, likely could never achieve an absolute cost advantage over Starship. If you add in Starship's economies of scale and rapid launch cadence, then cost per kilogram is also a pipe dream. So, Starship as a system has the only efficiencies that matter (the caveat being that those capabilities are still under development).
Of course, it doesn't help that the technologies for this notional launch vehicle don't actually exist (they're "under investigation") and the development path suggested by the study is practically tailor-made for eventual cancellation, especially with Europe's political environment of squabbling governments and contractors.
The one really interesting thing that comes out the study and its analysis of Starship is that SpaceX may actually be underselling the capabilities of Versions 2 and 3 of Starship.