[multiplegeorges]

How many space telescopes better than anything we currently have can we put up when launch costs are <$50m?

A huge synthetic telescope in orbit with an aperture the size of the planet?

How many private earth observation satellites?

The market is huge when weight constraints largely go away and $/kg drops so hard.

[kibwen]

The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9. Once again, just because you have a jumbo jet that can fly 500 people from New York to London does not mean that everyone flying out of New York wants to go to London, and it doesn't mean that it's worth flying that jumbo jet from New York to Pierre, South Dakota with only one passenger on board.

[fastball]

> The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9

What does that even mean? Almost every single Falcon 9 customer will prefer launching on Starship if/when it is available, because the cost will be much lower. A very small segment who have payloads that are exactly Falcon 9 sized and want a very particular orbit might still be better served by F9, but maybe not.

Beyond that, much lower cost unlocks previously untenable opportunities that you have not sufficiently imagined, as stated earlier.

[ben_w]

It may not even be cheaper when it works; upper stage reuse still isn't there.

(I'd like it to be, but until it is, it isn't).

[fastball]

The argument was "why do you even need Starship?", not "will it be fully re-usable at the end of the day?"

[ben_w]

> Almost every single Falcon 9 customer will prefer launching on Starship if/when it is available, because the cost will be much lower

Cost reduction depends on it being fully reusable.

[fastball]

Not actually sure that is true. Entirely possible that just by re-using Superheavy and expending Starship they could get to a price point lower than F9 (which also has an expendable upper stage).