A continuing series for the gravitationally impaired.
There was a debate about V2 economics in W.W.II. The Peenemunde boys said that they could build a simpler, cheaper, easier to build vehicle. The Luftwaffe said that their bomber crews were dying like flies, so the V2 as is was fine. V2 launch crews got to go home and sleep with their wives at night.
So, as to economics, If you're going to push a short program, like Apollo, then it really doesn't make sense to invest in a high performance launch vehicle. Burn a lot of fuel, use a lot of stages, make it low tech, get it done cheap. This is the philosophy of the Big Dumb Booster. If you're unmanned, fly the prototype vehicle as the mission. Accept that you will loose some launches. At the end of the project you have nothing left except the data. This is the blunt club approach, brute force and ignorance.
Now for a long term program, an industry, the idea of reusability becomes emergent. The classical aviation model says that fuel is king, reusability is key, and an investment in the highest technology will yield lower overall costs. Vehicle costs are extreme, but amortized over a large number of flights. You have to keep the vehicles flying ALL THE TIME, ground time is death. There is one problem with applying this model to Space, the high cost of doing anything in space overwhelms any cost savings of a reusable launch vehicle. Space Shuttle proved that. Reusability also hurts vehicle performance.
This produces a third case for space economics, the application of extremely low production costs. To produce the vast infrastructure needed to support humanity in Space, you need a million to one reduction in productivity costs over current practice, (read as replicating nanotechnology). With that level of cheapness, hardware again becomes an expendable item. Even though the launch vehicles produced may be of the highest technology imaginable, they are expendable, and the performance and safety advantages of an expendable vehicle are dominant. Sure you should recycle, but not reuse. So, strange as it seems, the Buck Rogers style fully reusable Single Stage to Orbit vehicle that the space supporters dream of has no future in spaceflight.