Commercial space systems are expensive because the rockets are expensive, though. When you spend a couple hundred million on a launch, everything has to be supe

Commercial space systems are expensive because the rockets are expensive, though. When you spend a couple hundred million on a launch, everything has to be super lightweight and durable. There’s nothing that says a comsat has to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s just the most cost effective way to use very expensive launches. In a world where reaching orbit is cheap, satellites can be cheap too. If it breaks down, go fix it, or bring it back and put up a new one. If it’s twice as heavy as it could be, but also twice as cheap, that becomes a win. Imagine if all cargo sent from China had to be sent in single-use cargo planes. Everything being sent would be designed around this. Making a cell phone one gram lighter but $10,000 more expensive would be a huge win. All of the cargo would be incredibly valuable. A naive analysis might therefore indicate that sending stuff on reusable ships instead of expendable cargo planes wouldn’t save you much money, since the cargo itself is most of the cost.