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Re:Science upside for Starship by TrainedMonkey on Monday November 22, 2021 @12:25PM (#29308992)
I think you argument hinges on the fact that demand shows up immediately after the price is cut. That would require there is a backlog of payloads which are just waiting for the price to be low enough. That is obviously not true, I believe lower prices are dramatically accelerating the demand as evidenced by space sector investment (1), but the demand curve is lagging because building space vehicles is hard.

(1) I could not find a good chart showing the historic Space Sector investment, but there were multiple articles talking about record amount of the investment: https://spacenews.com/space-industry-in-midst-of-transformat...

Re:Science upside for Starship by spfzero on Monday November 22, 2021 @01:55PM (#29310231)
>>building space vehicles is hard

...mostly because reliability must be so high and launching mass costs so much. If you can launch mass cheaply, and accept lower reliability, space vehicles should be much easier to build.

Re:Science upside for Starship by rbanffy on Monday November 22, 2021 @01:20PM (#29309790)
> That would require there is a backlog of payloads which are just waiting for the price to be low enough.

Not only that, but they'd need to integrate with Starship and, right now, we aren't even sure which way the payload needs to go once the target orbit is achieved (it looks like it's sideways, while every other launcher releases the payload forward).