[Arnt]

Why is it going to be huge? Who are the customers and what do they want?

I don't follow this closely, just look at the pretty pictures. If there's demand for lifting much bigger/heavier things to orbit than presently possible, I would probably not know, for lack of pretty pictures. So please tell.

[laughing_man]

Starlink will be the biggest customer, at least initially. They're planning on both substantially increasing the number of satellites in the constellation and increasing the size of those satellites. That will keep it in the black for years even in the absence of other work.

[jltsiren]

In that scenario, most of the value would be in Starlink.

Launch vehicles have always been the cheap part in going to space. Payloads tend to be more expensive, and the actual value is in the services enabled by the payloads.

[laughing_man]

The revenue is in Starlink, sure, but the value is in the launcher.

The reason payloads are expensive is because launch was expensive. If you're paying $10k/kg to launch your satellite you have to make sure it has a 99.9999999% chance of working when it gets to orbit. But if you lived in a world where you pay $10/kg for that same launch and could schedule another launch the next day to replace a payload that didn't work, your satellite would be much cheaper because you could afford to have it fail.

It would also be cheaper because you could afford more standardization. You could afford to use a standard bus, for example, even if it makes your satellite heavier than it needs to be.

There's a virtuous circle here. Cheaper launches mean cheaper satellites, and cheaper satellites mean more launches as previously un-economic activities start to pencil out.

[jltsiren]

Payloads are expensive, because high-value businesses can outbid low-value ones. By the time there is enough launch capacity for low-value businesses, manufacturing improvements should have made launch vehicles even cheaper.

Or you could look at this from another perspective. The services enabled by infrastructure must be more valuable than the infrastructure itself to justify the investment.

[laughing_man]

I don't see a reason to believe that wouldn't be the case.

[Arnt]

$10/kg is what DHL charges me for shipping things 100km. Are you saying that SpaceX intends to approach that price for delivery to orbit?

[laughing_man]

That's the goal, yes. I doubt they'll actually get there, but they may get to $100.