[lazysheepherd]

Exactly. It is so sad to see many great engineers working on decade-long projects with 300-something single failure points.

That time and money should instead be spent on reducing the cost per kg to orbit, as well as in-orbit manufacturing. Then engineers would spend the bulk of their time on actual science goals, not on tangents of fragile deployment sequences or shaving few grams from there and there.

[DocTomoe]

Reducing cost per kilogram sounds like a good idea at first - but then, that means people will become less careful about what they send up, eventually leading to space debris issues. The tragedy of the commons is a thing, even in space. I guess there should be an equilibrium price on kilogram-to-orbit.

[lazysheepherd]

Yeah, but it is somewhat like saying as your revenue scales, so does your expenses. And it indeed does. But it is a net win at the end of the day, for 10% of a billion is much better than 10% of a million.

With space debris, come debris cleaning bots, with those bots come more space debris, and next generation of cleaning bots ad infinitum. The net profit/benefit will scale in the meantime, which is what really matters.