It all depends on the market elasticity. Let's say your gadget costs 100,000 and only sells 50,000 per year. So, someone can say it doesn't make sense to try t

It all depends on the market elasticity. Let's say your gadget costs 100,000 and only sells 50,000 per year. So, someone can say it doesn't make sense to try to do the capital investment to build a factory that churns out cheap gadgets that only cost 35,000 - because the market is only 50,000 per year. That wouldn't be a good analysis. Of course, the market size is different if the price point is different. Satellites are expensive partly because launches are expensive. For example, you can't easily launch another satellite if your old one fails, so you spend a lot of money trying to make sure your satellite is very reliable. Now, there are new satellite manufactures doing them in a more agile way, using as much off the shelf components as possible. They sell the data on the internet. Your satellite project doesn't last twenty years like it would with NASA or ESA or the militaries. More likely only a few, and you iterate a lot, making upgrades to successive satellites, meaning more revenue with every, better, satellite. Typically these companies use shared launches (many satellites from different companies on the same launch), managed by a launch aggregator. They use vehicles like the Indian PSLV. Source: Finnish Satellite Workshop, attended a few times. https://spaceworkshop.fi/ https://spaceworkshop.fi/