Why do you even think resuability is on the agenda in the early stage of any rocket development?
More importantly, once CZ-10A has put Mengzhou in orbit it is considerred successful as far as CZ-10 and Mengzhou concern. Failing to recover has nothing to do with the subject which was tests for moon landing mission. I don't get how you made the connection between the mission to the moon and CZ-10A being reusable.
You seem to have a fetish on the means (reusability) than on doing a job.
Are you serious right now? Why does nobody on this forum get just how much of a game changer reusability is? Is everyone else dumb? Why don't people get basic engineering principles?
Firstly, the more you do something, the better you get at it. 2ndly, the best way to human rate a rocket is to launch it a bunch of times and work the kinks out and make sure it doesn't explode. The timeline for the CZ-10 to launch humans by 2030 is tight, being able to reuse the first stages means that you can launch your rocket a lot more often and thus have a bigger buffer in case of a mishap and a much greater confidence in your rocket. A rocket that has launched 20 times with a single mishap is a lot better than a rocket that has launched a single time without mishap. And if you do find issues, this will give you a chance to fix it and launch again.
After all, without reuse, every CZ-10 launch is
21 YF-100 engines being thrown away by the 1st stage every launch. You think rocket engines grow on trees? That's more YF-100s being destroyed with a single LM-10 launch than the total amount of YF-100 ever used by all of the LM-8 rockets ever launched. Every landing is 21 engines saved and that can be reused for little costs, compared to building 21 engines from scratch. You think this wouldn't greatly speed up the launch rate of the LM-10? If you're gonna reuse a rocket ASAP, it might as well be the super expensive heavy lift rocket that uses an insane amount of engines, that's already designed from the ground up to be reusable and whom the 2030 lunar landings depend on it meeting a very tight launch schedule and probably 4-5 launches over 3 years.
Even the basic CZ-10A is still 7 engines being destroyed without reuse. We already see how difficult it is for China to mass produce the YF-100, there's a reason why the newer generations of LM rockets that use the YF-100 are still the miniority of launches, despite many attempts at boosting production for years. There's a real risk that the 2030 date slips, just because there will be delays over the production of so many engines and rockets. 4 CZ-10 launches means 84 YF-100s getting destroyed without any reuse. Fun fact, the total number of CZ-7 ever launched, 18 of them since 2016, all those 18 combined launches over 9 years gives you a total of 108 YF-100s. But you think it's gonna be simple for China to produce the 84 YF-100s between 2027 and 2030 needed for the crewed lunar landings? They have been struggling to mass produce the CZ-8 for years now despite the base variant only needing two YF-100s. That's the one downside about reusable rockets, you need more engines per rocket.
There's always a chance that a launch fails too, be it the rocket, or even the Mengzhou or some other weird issue. Having as many rockets in backup as possible is important when you're working on such a tight schedule. If the 2nd stage or the payload fucks up for whatever reason, that's 21 YF-100s wasted for nothing. You think China can magic up so many rocket engines in such a tight 2027-2030 timeframe if even a single launch fails for whatever reason? But if you have a backup of landed rockets from earlier launches, that's a great buffer for little cost.
And there's lots of other factors at work here. This is more than just the CZ-10 and lunar landing here. Think big picture pls.
1) The CZ-10A is China's first reusable Long March rocket. If the private sector fucks up badly, it has the potential to be China's first reusable rocket ever. Once they do make it land and reuse it, the lessons that engineers will learn greatly affect every other Chinese reusable rocket in development, both in the state and private sector. This is not just about the CZ-10, the earlier Chinese engineers learn more about reusable rockets, the better all the other reusable rockets will get. This will effect rockets in early stages of development more, since they can make greater design changes based on the lessons learned from landing and reusing the LM-10.
2) Refurbishment is a great learning opportunity. Do you know why the F9 is so very very reliable? It's because it's the only rocket where you can recover the first stage and find out how being launched into orbit affected the rocket. Do you not understand how difficult it is to engineer something that destroys itself after you use it? You can't dissect a used rocket and find out how being launched to 2.5km/s, the heat, aerodynamic pressure and the vibrations of the engines affect the delicate systems of pipes and valves in a rocket, because said rocket is impacting the earth at terminal velocity after use. You can test fire engines on a test stand, but it's not the same as a real launch.
Well, with reuse, you can take a 1st stage back completely intact and just cut it open and examine in great detail at potential issues that might result in a future mission failure. I can guarantee you that the 1st landed rocket of any type, are gonna be ripped apart and every little detail is gonna examined with a fine toothed comb. Maybe one of the seals/valves is weak and there's a 20% chance of it rupturing and destroying the rocket with every launch, but engineers can't catch the flaw until they get unlucky with a launch and the rockets actually explodes and exposes the problem. But since you can actually get the rocket back in one piece, you can spot the problem before it actually happens. See my first point for how this will affect future reusable rocket development too. There's probably lots of small and major changes that you can make to the internals of a rocket that will optimize it for reuse that China won't know about until you actually land a rocket and cut it open to find out. Better to find out early, so that you can find apply the changes to other resauble rockets sooner, when they are early in their design phase.