I'm a huge fan of spacex, but Elon is, as always, "optimistic". > Musk stated (I think he just did some mental napkin math at one point) that if they meet thei

I'm a huge fan of spacex, but Elon is, as always, "optimistic". > Musk stated (I think he just did some mental napkin math at one point) that if they meet their goals, the world's launch capacity will be expanded by two orders of magnitude. How often does any new development in any field bring about two orders of extra capacity? How does this incredible capacity change how you use this thing? With napkin math is't easy. Adding one zero here, one zero there, and you can easily show that you're increasing world's capacity by two orders of magnitude. Elon is known for big over-simplification in his vision statements. > A launch would cost fuel + support operations + amortized cost of rocket. The last two will tend towards zero as they can be increasingly automated and will be a small fixed cost. That's just day-dreaming, that support will tend towards zero. Even if it's design for rapid reuse, and they deliver on it, support is a almost always biggest cost of running any complicated machinery.