I had forgotten that Elon Musk said he could reduce launch costs by two orders of magnitude.

The problem - the heartbreaking problem, as I see it - is that even when you could launch anything to space for any reason so long as you were stickin' it to the Russkies/Capitalist Dogs, we were only launching about double what we launch now. We've got an entire Iridium constellation up there and it couldn't make enough money to support itself. Musk is planning like six thousand satellites to beam broadband everywhere but that's as much about justifying his rocket company as anything else.

People forget that the only reason SpaceX exists is because Roscosmos/Energia told Musk to get stuffed so he set about to reverse engineer Roscosmos/Energia. He's done a fine job. There is now a Soviet design bureau to compete with the bloated capitalists of the United Launch Alliance. But it doesn't mean there's a use case for space.

Let's say a Falcon Heavy is $100m to orbit, like SpaceX claims. 'k, great. That's about $1600 bucks per kilo. It'll also launch about 2/3rds of a Skylab. Super awesome! So for $150m we've got a Skylab-sized chunk of space hotel into orbit. That's not bloody bad - Skylab cost the equivalent of about $12b. A Falcon Heavy comes in at ten percent the cost of a Saturn 5 (disregarding development costs).

A 90% cost reduction ain't nuthin'. But how much do we really need space stations? How much do we really need space tourism? What's the demand? The first space station went up before I was born and I'm an old man. When we were about to send up the ISS we refused to pay to keep Mir in the sky - apparently the world only needed one space station at any given time.

Before it ever flew, Al Gore argued that if we could fill the payload of the shuttle bay with feathers and have them magically turn to gold in orbit, we'd only lose $70m per launch. Space has never been about the money, but Musk and Bezos are all trying to find a business case for it because they read The Man Who Sold The Moon as kids.

I want to believe. But I stood on a beach and watched $9b go into orbit with a half-dozen strangers and a couple SF dudes on horseback and it changed me. We wanted bin Laden dead nine billion dollars worth and if that's the ground truth on the economics, reusable boosters aren't enough to change the narrative.