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Launch costs are absolutely an important factor that makes everything space-related extremely expensive. When it costs $1B to launch something, you have to make

Launch costs are absolutely an important factor that makes everything space-related extremely expensive. When it costs $1B to launch something, you have to make damn sure you're not launching a dud. That, in turn, makes building the thing even more expensive because you need triple and quadruple redundancies on everything, and everything needs to be tested a bazillion times. When a launch is "only" $50M, you can get away with much fewer redundancies, less testing making the thing you launch much cheaper. And yeah, the first large-scale change we've seen from it is vastly better / cheaper satellite internet, but there will be others. Axiom space is a good example; a private company sending astronauts on missions.

somenameforme 3y ago
There's also the issue that the cheaper something gets, the more potential it has for uses that simply didn't exist before. Take airflight. Imagine planes/flights were about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than they are today. So many things we take for granted in society would simply no longer exist. Air shipping - gone, trans-Atlantic vacations - gone (or spend a month both ways on a ship), even military air forces would probably no longer exist - kind of weird when a new jet starts costing in the ballpark of an aircraft carrier. Try to imagine society without affordable airflight. It'd be so different that it's literally difficult to even begin to imagine all of the implications. And the same thing will be true of affordable spaceflight, but to a far greater scale. One of the most simplistic and "boring" examples of this would be material scarcity - gone. There are asteroids idling around, in reachable distance, with metals and other elements amounting to trillions of dollars on value. Of course the first mega-load coming back will completely crash the market, but that's entirely the point. What we view as scarce no longer will be, thanks simply to lowering the cost of spaceflight. Get it low enough and you could even conceivably create a world where various highly polluting industries could simply be off-planeted, with the resultant products being shipped back. And I'm actively avoiding anything remotely sci-fi. These are the boring, almost certain things, and they alone already are making the future look utterly alien, based on nothing but cheaper spaceflight.

somenameforme 3y ago

There's also the issue that the cheaper something gets, the more potential it has for uses that simply didn't exist before. Take airflight. Imagine planes/flights were about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than they are today. So many things we take for granted in society would simply no longer exist. Air shipping - gone, trans-Atlantic vacations - gone (or spend a month both ways on a ship), even military air forces would probably no longer exist - kind of weird when a new jet starts costing in the ballpark of an aircraft carrier. Try to imagine society without affordable airflight. It'd be so different that it's literally difficult to even begin to imagine all of the implications. And the same thing will be true of affordable spaceflight, but to a far greater scale. One of the most simplistic and "boring" examples of this would be material scarcity - gone. There are asteroids idling around, in reachable distance, with metals and other elements amounting to trillions of dollars on value. Of course the first mega-load coming back will completely crash the market, but that's entirely the point. What we view as scarce no longer will be, thanks simply to lowering the cost of spaceflight. Get it low enough and you could even conceivably create a world where various highly polluting industries could simply be off-planeted, with the resultant products being shipped back. And I'm actively avoiding anything remotely sci-fi. These are the boring, almost certain things, and they alone already are making the future look utterly alien, based on nothing but cheaper spaceflight.