Don't know why your comment was down-voted. $10m is a high launch price. Either SpaceX's BFR or a fully reusable New Glenn could get below that price with one o

Don't know why your comment was down-voted. $10m is a high launch price. Either SpaceX's BFR or a fully reusable New Glenn could get below that price with one or two orders of magnitude more payload. And I completely agree about the financials. There's some pretty strong Kool-Aid being passed around in the smallsat industry. Requiring dozens or hundreds of launches per year to meet revenue requirements? The main argument against reuse has always been lack of demand, but if you're already assuming 100 launches per year (or thereabouts), reuse clearly makes more sense. And 3D printing is not likely to reduce costs per unit aerospace dry mass. 3D printing is fantastic for increasing the iteration frequency and reducing tooling costs. But if you're entering high-rate production (as all these revenue assumptions imply), then that advantage of 3D printing rapidly disappears, and conventional manufacturing is almost always cheaper per unit. And for performance, this is even more true. Conventional forgings have much higher specific strength than any 3D printing process with a similar alloy. The alignment in grain flow just can't be beat. And forgings allow mass production as well, so benefit a lot from series production, allowing low unit costs at high material performance. (The soda can is the ultimate manifestation of this: extremely good mechanical performance with very little weight and almost no cost.) 3D printing generally produces parts somewhere between wrought and cast. So if you're making the "mass produced expendable" argument for low launch cost, you should avoid 3D printing! I have a deep (but autodidact) knowledge of space launch, and I professional do metal 3D printing, including of aerospace components. And there are a whole bunch of these smallsat launchers. All of them seem to think they will be the winners with ~100 launches per year (in a market where Pegasus gets about 1 launch every two or three years??). They also all seem to think they can compete against reuse by just really trying hard to make expendable costs lower. I simply don't see how this is feasible. In a world where there are hundreds of smallsat launches per year, there's no way you get to charge $10m per launch to do so. EDIT:I forgot to mention: 3D printing is not a cheaper manufacturing option than existing conventional manufacturing on a per-dry-unit basis. You're still talking on the order of $1000/kg, which is the same as finished aerospace products. PLUS, there's still an enormous amount of touch labor involved in 3D printing anything. The main advantage of 3D printing is the minimum order is 1, which is good for testing and iteration.