[elif]

If musk followed strict economics as implied by your premise, he would be launching disposable rockets with Boeing.

who knows what expense space X would be willing to shoulder to be sustainable... We are fortunate that it is still privately owned, and isn't legally obligated to pursue the financial interests of shareholders like all the other players in aerospace.

[lazide]

Pretty sure what Musk has been doing is a reasonably common business case - generating demand with some impressive salesmanship to increase volume and disrupt a schlerotic market ripe for disruption by driving down unit costs - and eventually competitors out of business. With decreases in unit costs, it unlocks more uses, which is a positive cycle.

It’s not an unusual playbook at all, but it is unusual that it is done in the satellite launch space. Kudos to him for that.

All the other players are military industrial complex, and the reason they act the way they do is more about market capture than anything else - shareholders are of course a concern, but not a huge one.

It also doesn’t change thermodynamics or any of the energy gathering, chemical precursor gathering, infrastructure, or raw input gathering problems.

Mars gets very little insolation. Mars has no infrastructure. Mars has no breathable air. Mars has no known life or biological sources we could survive on. Mars is very cold. Mars has no raw materials (or useful environments we know of to process anything) that would justify the energy required to export it.

It’s literally more hospitable and more useful to be on the North Pole, and I don’t see anyone in a rush to build housing developments there.