>>14217626>Payload to destination doesn't have any utility of its own.I mean, it does. They've already proven it with Starlink. There is plenty of demand and money to be made there, particularly in marine and aerospace. The big thing they need is lower launch cost and more cadence. Starship looks like it really realistically will be able to launch for $10-20million a time. Conservatively with just 100 tons to LEO, that'd be $200/kg which is still an insane price drop. Best case it's more like $67/kg.
That kind of pricing, combined with ultra high cadence and huge fairings, changes everything about viability of a vast amount of stuff in space. People don't get that there are positive spirals here. A lot of the high cost of sats is precisely because of high launch cost and high cost of sats. If you need to pay thousands or tens of thousands per kg to launch and you have very limited total mass budget, then everything is optimized and bespoke. You use exotic expensive materials everywhere to squeeze out every last bit of performance, which takes longer, which adds more money, which means each single thing matters more, which pushes towards further extra testing and work, which costs more money, and on and on.
Cheap puts all that in reverse. You can just use steel or other cheap stuff. You can iterate fast. Less cost means it's fine to have lower lifetime and just replace more often, which pushes further iteration and mass production which makes it even cheaper. It also means COTS components that don't last as long are fine, doesn't need to last 20 years if you're just going to replace it in 5. Which means performance can also be higher, more modern tech. The whole market dynamic is precisely what makes it hard to predict yet exciting anyway. Same as cars, there is a straight line path from mass produced Fords to a local convenience gas station, even though Ford has zero to do with that latter directly.
