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Re:Science upside for Starship by vkou on Monday November 22, 2021 @09:18PM (#29313922)
Alternative theory: People have a decent understanding of the value of satellites, and it's SpaceX who doesn't.

If you lower the dollar cost of going to the dentist by 10x, you're not going to see people going to the dentist 10 times more often.

Re:Science upside for Starship by rbanffy on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @06:52AM (#29316767)
If someone made having my mouth professionally cleaned more convenient, I would change the schedule to every 3 months instead of every six.

We can anticipate some businesses would benefit from having low-cost access to microgravity environments - right now you carefully select your experiments, because it's extremely costly, but, if it weren't, you wouldn't need to.

While satellite/probe/crewed-craft building has an extensive industrial chain with multiple bottlenecks that would hold it back if launch costs plumeted, there are others that have few and that would be enabled.

We'd probably need a lot of barriers so that people don't launch cubesats for $100 in volumes that make LEO dangerous.

Re:Science upside for Starship by vkou on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @12:48PM (#29320786)
And if someone had self-cleaning easier, you wouldn't be going in for cleaning at all.

Nobody cares about satellites themselves. What they care about is using them for something useful. Communication and imaging. At some point, both markets will become saturated.

I don't know what level of demand there is for them, but it's entirely conceivable that it will be long-term limited by something other than launch costs.