> We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space sy

> We need a team of economists to rederive the relative elasticities of various design choices and boil them down to a new set of design heuristics for space system production oriented towards maximizing volume of production. Or, more generally, maximizing some robust utility function assuming saturation of Starship launch capacity. This is not really what economists do. Elasticity is not something an economist can “derive” or predict in advance of market developments with any reliability. It can only be reliably observed. That is the whole point of a free market. What is possible—changes in elasticity between factors—emerges from complex behavior. As it emerges, new efforts can compete to take advantage of it, thereby themselves creating new possibilities. This is why people are not re-inventing everything around the Starship vision yet; because it hasn’t actually happened yet. There are many projects and companies sitting on the garbage heap of history because of, basically, a branch prediction error. They guessed wrong on direction or timing. Even if Elon is right about Starship costs, but it takes significantly longer than expected to get there, that’s a huge risk to projects that set it today as a dependency.