That same space company said that they'd do point to point commercial travel using rockets. As for significantly outperforming: Ask NASA, price per launch has gone UP not DOWN. What's the point of reusability if it doesn't affect the bottom line in a positive way?
> The development of commercial launch systems has substantially reduced the cost of space launch. NASA’s space shuttle had a cost of about $1.5 billion to launch 27,500 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), $54,500/kg. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 now advertises a cost of $62 million to launch 22,800 kg to LEO, $2,720/kg.
It is required to assume good faith in you HN replies… which imo makes it a nicer place to discuss things. People can be wrong about things or be referring to different information without intentionally lying.
I'd wager mainly because there is no competition, and there is no motivation for SpaceX to charge less.
The cost for regular launches has gone down a lot.
But, to be fair, it has not gone down nearly as far as it could. SpaceX still has big margins there. I assume because again there is too little competition, and because going from 60 to 25 Million doesn't increase the potential market by all that much, so no huge motivation to drop prices.
Starship might allow them to go so much lower that entirely new markets can emerge, but I'm skeptical.
It's a bit of a different story for rideshare missions, those do make it way, way cheaper to launch small satelites.
> That same space company said that they'd do point to point commercial travel using rockets.
I think they still hope to achieve that in the future. It is just there are a lot of more critical milestones they need to hit first before they try to tackle that.
