Well, SpaceX is attempting a 1/10th cost reduction with starship. That's one way to exponentially increase rates, drop the cost dramatically so a far larger num

Well, SpaceX is attempting a 1/10th cost reduction with starship. That's one way to exponentially increase rates, drop the cost dramatically so a far larger number of use cases become feasible. Then you might get space hooks, orbital cannons, asteroid/moon mining etc. It's kind of akin to Moore's "law" which really is an observation of continual investment, research, and production to enable larger and larger economic uses. Space has a near-infinite (relative to our experience) of "potential use cases": there's a lot of usable matter out there, boatloads of always-on solar energy without pesky clouds, atmospheres, or night-time, and of course a LOT of room, and no gravity. So if you get economic profit from launching things into space, and the cost of the launching gradually goes down, even linearly, the amount of use will be a multiple of the linear cost improvement. I guess Moore's law was what it was because what was being optimized was two-dimensional shrinking. Space in orbit is a bit of two dimensional (orbital planes) with stacking, but then in deep space it will be purely three dimensional expansion. That's pretty exponential as a driving force.