If Starship delivers even half of what they're promising, we'll have a bunch of commercial space stations up even without NASA support.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_space_stati...

Building a commercial station isn't very easy. And if you are not investing a a couple billion your not even in the game.

Non of those companies will invest billions on their own. All of those companies investment is predicated on NASA support.

Do you really believe Northrop Grumman will invest billions of its own money?

The Startups are to small an inexperienced.

And Bezos has already said they will not do this unless they get NASA investment.

To just link to a bunch 'commercial' stations is missing the point. These concept exists because NASA has announced they will fund multiple 'commercial' station. But unfortunately Congress has not given NASA the budget for these.

There's quite a gulf between what's promised and what's been tested. Despite the backfilling about just a test and total success there's were a LOT of big failures in that first launch test.

But what's the market for those, without NASA funding? Maybe one Salyut-sized station for "space tourism" (that is to say, 1-3 day stays for like 3 people at a time), and maybe one similarly sized station for space manufacturing (which is currently just optical fiber) and commercial 0g experiments. You could dock both together to share some systems. But what's the market demand for anything beyond those two stations, never mind any station comparable to the ISS?

Starship economics change everything. Today, it costs on the order of $1500/kg to hoist something to orbit with a Falcon 9. Even if you add a zero to Elon's predictions of $15/kg with Starship, you're still reducing costs by 10x, which means zero-gravity manufacturing at scale, space tourism for 100 people at a time, etc etc becomes possible.

I'm pretty sure the number of people who'd be willing to pay money to vacation in LEO is considerably larger than what a single Salyut-sized station can house - even before considering the rise in demand from lowered costs.

That said, I think the real money-maker will come from factories in lunar orbit. Even if the economics of Terra importing goods from Luna never quite pan out, being able to build even some (let alone most, let alone all) of a spacecraft in space from spaceborne materials would be a game-changer for exploration and eventual colonization of the Solar System and beyond.

They should at the very least partner with ESA which also built some ISS modules.