Impact of SpaceX rideshare on small sat launchers market

[M.E.T.]

Now all you need is 100,000t of new satellites each year, in order to exceed $10B worth of Starship payload capacity.

Once you have that, then the market will start growing. So then, how long do you reckon it will take for the market to require more than 100,000t of upmass in a single year?

But why won't Starship shrink the "launch market"? If they're offering more payload for lower prices, surely the same number of satellites could launch for less, thus lowering the value of the market as a whole. Your insistence that the market value has been, is, and always shall be $10 billion despite massive changes in launch vehicles and the payloads they carry makes no sense.

Absolutely. I am trying to counter the argument that the market will grow thanks to Starship, by showing how absurdly great the tonnage to orbit has to be to just equal the current market revenue, never-mind exceed it. But this indeed just shows that the market might well shrink if Starship operates at those low price levels.

[greybeardengineer]

So what people are talking about is that SX is using proprietary technolgy (and it is proprietary. They won't sell it to you or transfer the technology to anyone else) to potentially (because no one knows their real costs) offer rideshares at artificially low prices to drive their competitors into bankruptcy.

Using the money from their main business "segment" of the market (multi-tonne launch) to kill off competition in a secondary market. IOW a pre-emptive strike.

That's called "predatory pricing" in the anti-trust jargon.  Of course with a single, tighly intergrated company its very difficult to prove unless a whistle blower hands a copy of key documents to the relevant regulator. The problem is does anyone regulate space launch prices in the US?

Stop yelling at clouds.

It is called competitive advantage. About a quarter century ago Intel started competing with the proprietary RISC based server and workstation markets with Pentium Pro initially and then Xeon. They took advantage of their vertical integration, incredible economy of scale, and R&D costs amortized across multiple product lines. Now most proprietary architectures are history and the few remaining, the oldest and most established hold about 10% revenue market share.

Nearly everything we do is handled by servers in the background and as a society we are far better off and wealthier for the technological change. Many of the old school computer companies are still around but now add value where they can around Intel and AMD processors. Some old space giants will likely still be around years from now but they will thrive by using cheap launch, not bitching about it.

The market abhors a monopoly so the only question is who will step up as the rocket AMD to SpaceX's role as rocket Intel. Being nostalgic about expendable rockets, large and small, and whining to the press about big bad SpaceX isn't going to cut it.

[Robotbeat]

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is made out of smallsats. SpaceX launches them in a cluster with extremely low marginal cost, even lower than Transporter. If SpaceX didn’t offer cluster launching to other smallsats, you could credibly accuse them of uncompetitive behavior. They’ve even launched some other megaconstellation satellites this way, I think Boeing’s constellation project has launched one or two prototypes on Transporter?

Sucks if you made a business on a dead end approach like expendable small lift launch (while poo-pooing larger lift and reusability the whole time), but being uncompetitive against better technology that far better serves the overall market need is your own fault. It’s good that the market culls dead end technology. And it’s massively good for the much larger (and higher revenue) satellite industry that SpaceX doesn’t keep their reusable launch capability to themselves.

The future isn’t Astra or Vega, it’s Stoke.

[john smith 19]

Stop yelling at clouds.
:
:
The market abhors a monopoly so the only question is who will step up as the rocket AMD to SpaceX's role as ro
cket Intel. Being nostalgic about expendable rockets, large and small, and whining to the press about big bad SpaceX isn't going to cut it.

The first rule of monopoly club is "Never call it a monopoly"
"Oh no we're not a monopoly, we're just the best"
"Oh no we're not a monopoly. It's not our fault all our competitors don't work very well with our products"
Blah, blah, blah.

I've done some digging into Intel's history specifically and you're right, they are not a monopoly.
They are more of a co-dependent enabler of Microsoft. If you need one you pretty much need the other. An arrangement that started from the days of the NDA protected Intel/Microsoft cross-licensing agreement AKA "The Microsoft Tax." But I assume you know this, as you are a "Greybearedengineer."

Because when hardware doesn't have to run Windows and the slew of MS products mfg generally don't choose to run Intel either. Intel's performance in embedded systems generally and mobile phones especially has been laughable. All that revenue. All that leading edge lithography. All those design tools. Still can't make a chip that's doesn't make a pretty good ear warmer. 

And BTW those burgening data centers you're so impressed by are starting to put serious strain on power and water supplies on a global scale. 

Musk comes from an IT background and that kids story about "The market abhors a monopoly " is exactly that. A story told to children, that only children should believe. 

In reality IBM was effectively a mainframe monopoly for decades as MS has been a desktop monopoly for decades and Google has had an effective monopoly on search for decades. So no the customers don't much like it but as a monopolist, who cares what they like? That was the sort of question IBM asked when people started bringing Apple IIs and TSR80's to work.

People have to live with monopolies and over time monopolies have a tendency to think they are loved because of what they do.  But boy, given them a chance to get out from under and generally stick it to said monopoly and watch what happens. 

Are you seeing a pattern here? It's where Musk comes from. So in fact effective monopoly (which is what all of those were or are) is SOP for some companies. If they aren't already they want to be one. And if they can't be they'll work pretty hard to strangle as many potential competitors in the cradle, even if they can't get them all.

My interest is to see launch prices drop 10x. Nothing less. To that end my only real question is always "How will this company (or it's behavior) move the market toward lowering launc prices 10x. "

Hint: Monopolies don't lower prices, except in market segments they want to kill competition in. And when the killings done don't expect the low prices to last there either.

WRT to this thread title I expect only the very fittest will survive (or who have nation state backers who don't want that level dependency on a US based corporation).

Then we'll see if SX draws the line at just trying to price competitors out of the market or if it goes full-on NCR instead. We'll see.

[su27k]

My interest is to see launch prices drop 10x. Nothing less. To that end my only real question is always "How will this company (or it's behavior) move the market toward lowering launc prices 10x. "

Hint: Monopolies don't lower prices, except in market segments they want to kill competition in. And when the killings done don't expect the low prices to last there either.

If SpaceX is going to sell full capacity of Starship at FH price (let's say around $150M) as I suspected, then the market $/kg for Starship would be around $1,000/kg, a 10x reduction from $/kg of Atlas V.

So yeah, "monopolies" do lower unit price of capability, just like you can buy an Intel CPU for the same price but way more powerful a few years later.

[DanClemmensen]

My interest is to see launch prices drop 10x. Nothing less. To that end my only real question is always "How will this company (or it's behavior) move the market toward lowering launc prices 10x. "

Hint: Monopolies don't lower prices, except in market segments they want to kill competition in. And when the killings done don't expect the low prices to last there either.

If SpaceX is going to sell full capacity of Starship at FH price (let's say around $150M) as I suspected, then the market $/kg for Starship would be around $1,000/kg, a 10x reduction from $/kg of Atlas V.

So yeah, "monopolies" do lower unit price of capability, just like you can buy an Intel CPU for the same price but way more powerful a few years later.

Sigh. This is high school level economics. A theoretical monopoly in a pure market with demand elasticity will set the price to maximize total profit. If a lower price attracts more customers, then the monopoly may lower the price. Decrease profit margin but increase total profit. Reality is more complicated but the principle applies.

[DanClemmensen]

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is made out of smallsats. SpaceX launches them in a cluster with extremely low marginal cost, even lower than Transporter. If SpaceX didn’t offer cluster launching to other smallsats, you could credibly accuse them of uncompetitive behavior. They’ve even launched some other megaconstellation satellites this way, I think Boeing’s constellation project has launched one or two prototypes on Transporter?

There is apparently a taxonomy of satellites, and "smallsat" tops out at 1200 kg.
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_satellite
The existing Starlinks are smallsats, but they and all other existing constellations were designed before Starship. It turns out that bigger satellites are preferable if you can pay for them, ans that's why the Starship version of Starlink gen 2 will be about 1400 kg.

[M.E.T.]

My interest is to see launch prices drop 10x. Nothing less. To that end my only real question is always "How will this company (or it's behavior) move the market toward lowering launc prices 10x. "

Hint: Monopolies don't lower prices, except in market segments they want to kill competition in. And when the killings done don't expect the low prices to last there either.

If SpaceX is going to sell full capacity of Starship at FH price (let's say around $150M) as I suspected, then the market $/kg for Starship would be around $1,000/kg, a 10x reduction from $/kg of Atlas V.

So yeah, "monopolies" do lower unit price of capability, just like you can buy an Intel CPU for the same price but way more powerful a few years later.

Sigh. This is high school level economics. A theoretical monopoly in a pure market with demand elasticity will set the price to maximize total profit. If a lower price attracts more customers, then the monopoly may lower the price. Decrease profit margin but increase total profit. Reality is more complicated but the principle applies.

My broader point is that this mechanism - irrespective of number of competitors - will still play out within a constrained overall market of ~$10B or less.

If it’s just SpaceX, and they launch at $100M per Starship, then that’s 100 Starship launches per year. If there’s competition from say Relativity who can launch at say half that price, then Starship drops their price to $50M, so then the $10B market equates to 200 launches a year (from all competitors). And if Stoke is able to launch for $10M and Starship drops their price to match that, then the $10B market consists of 1000 launches per year.

But the overall market size is unlikely to grow. The competition over the scraps just gets more intense.

Point being - the financial incentive to go into the launch industry at this point in history is really not there. Not if return on investment is your motivation.

It’s a race to the bottom, because while number of launches might shoot up by an order of magnitude, overall revenue will stay flat, or even decrease.

Edit

And to be clear, $10B is just a round number used for illustrative purposes. I doubt the market is really even that size at the moment. SpaceX launched more than all competitors combined this year, and I doubt their launch revenue (even if Starlink is accounted for as a customer), exceeded $3B. So $10B is probably a high end estimate for the commercial launch market in the foreseeable future.

[imprezive]

My interest is to see launch prices drop 10x. Nothing less. To that end my only real question is always "How will this company (or it's behavior) move the market toward lowering launc prices 10x. "

Hint: Monopolies don't lower prices, except in market segments they want to kill competition in. And when the killings done don't expect the low prices to last there either.

If SpaceX is going to sell full capacity of Starship at FH price (let's say around $150M) as I suspected, then the market $/kg for Starship would be around $1,000/kg, a 10x reduction from $/kg of Atlas V.

So yeah, "monopolies" do lower unit price of capability, just like you can buy an Intel CPU for the same price but way more powerful a few years later.

Sigh. This is high school level economics. A theoretical monopoly in a pure market with demand elasticity will set the price to maximize total profit. If a lower price attracts more customers, then the monopoly may lower the price. Decrease profit margin but increase total profit. Reality is more complicated but the principle applies.

My broader point is that this mechanism - irrespective of number of competitors - will still play out within a constrained overall market of ~$10B or less.

If it’s just SpaceX, and they launch at $100M per Starship, then that’s 100 Starship launches per year. If there’s competition from say Relativity who can launch at say half that price, then Starship drops their price to $50M, so then the $10B market equates to 200 launches a year (from all competitors). And if Stoke is able to launch for $10M and Starship drops their price to match that, then the $10B market consists of 1000 launches per year.

But the overall market size is unlikely to grow. The competition over the scraps just gets more intense.

Point being - the financial incentive to go into the launch industry at this point in history is really not there. Not if return on investment is your motivation.

It’s a race to the bottom, because while number of launches might shoot up by an order of magnitude, overall revenue will stay flat, or even decrease.

Edit

And to be clear, $10B is just a round number used for illustrative purposes. I doubt the market is really even that size at the moment. SpaceX launched more than all competitors combined this year, and I doubt their launch revenue (even if Starlink is accounted for as a customer), exceeded $3B. So $10B is probably a high end estimate for the commercial launch market in the foreseeable future.

I think you’re trying to make a point that’s not really relevant to the thread and purely conjecture on your part. The Transporter program has induced demand into the launch market. That’s shows that, regardless of the theoretical impact of Starship on, the small sat launch market (you know what this thread is about) is in fact not a fixed pie.

[M.E.T.]

My interest is to see launch prices drop 10x. Nothing less. To that end my only real question is always "How will this company (or it's behavior) move the market toward lowering launc prices 10x. "

Hint: Monopolies don't lower prices, except in market segments they want to kill competition in. And when the killings done don't expect the low prices to last there either.

If SpaceX is going to sell full capacity of Starship at FH price (let's say around $150M) as I suspected, then the market $/kg for Starship would be around $1,000/kg, a 10x reduction from $/kg of Atlas V.

So yeah, "monopolies" do lower unit price of capability, just like you can buy an Intel CPU for the same price but way more powerful a few years later.

Sigh. This is high school level economics. A theoretical monopoly in a pure market with demand elasticity will set the price to maximize total profit. If a lower price attracts more customers, then the monopoly may lower the price. Decrease profit margin but increase total profit. Reality is more complicated but the principle applies.

My broader point is that this mechanism - irrespective of number of competitors - will still play out within a constrained overall market of ~$10B or less.

If it’s just SpaceX, and they launch at $100M per Starship, then that’s 100 Starship launches per year. If there’s competition from say Relativity who can launch at say half that price, then Starship drops their price to $50M, so then the $10B market equates to 200 launches a year (from all competitors). And if Stoke is able to launch for $10M and Starship drops their price to match that, then the $10B market consists of 1000 launches per year.

But the overall market size is unlikely to grow. The competition over the scraps just gets more intense.

Point being - the financial incentive to go into the launch industry at this point in history is really not there. Not if return on investment is your motivation.

It’s a race to the bottom, because while number of launches might shoot up by an order of magnitude, overall revenue will stay flat, or even decrease.

Edit

And to be clear, $10B is just a round number used for illustrative purposes. I doubt the market is really even that size at the moment. SpaceX launched more than all competitors combined this year, and I doubt their launch revenue (even if Starlink is accounted for as a customer), exceeded $3B. So $10B is probably a high end estimate for the commercial launch market in the foreseeable future.

I think you’re trying to make a point that’s not really relevant to the thread and purely conjecture on your part. The Transporter program has induced demand into the launch market. That’s shows that, regardless of the theoretical impact of Starship on, the small sat launch market (you know what this thread is about) is in fact not a fixed pie.

The point remains. Transporter induced demand for more launches, but at a much lower price point, and as a small subset of the overall, static commercial launch pie.

Anyway, I’ve expressed my view as clearly as I am able to. People are free to disagree.

[john smith 19]

If SpaceX is going to sell full capacity of Starship at FH price (let's say around $150M) as I suspected,

You do realise that is just your personal opinion right?

SX actual history is they price relative to the market and keep the lowered costs as additional profit.
Because (as Marketing courses will teach you) cost ¬=profit.

One form of pricing that Marketing courses teach is called "Functional" pricing. So SX sells a Starship ride (because unlike every other transport system you can only buy a ticket-to-ride, on the usual argument that the infrastruture is far too expensive and complicated to duplicate for a customer) and if it's a rideshare then it'll have rideshare pricing, if it's an F9 equivalent it will have an F9 price (to LEO)

If it's an F9 to GEO that won't be the sticker price (as Shotwell has mentioned in the past) it'll be at something that's close to an A6, and likewise if it's an FH then it'll be at FH prices. And if it's an escape mission to another planet CALL.

It's real simple. You want more. You pay more. You want more than anything any other supplier can supply, then you pay the SX price, which will be negotiated with you probably under an NDA. You don't like their price you don't launch. Your choice.

So yeah, "monopolies" do lower unit price of capability, just like you can buy an Intel CPU for the same price but way more powerful a few years later.

It's highly doubtful that would have happened at the pace it did without AMD (and earlier competitors) pushing them. In fact were they actual Intel innovations, or their response to other suppliers? If the latter No other suppliers--> nothing to respond to--> no innovation needed. 

I have experience in the IBM "I series" and every few years they release upgraded processors with upgraded processors. IOW "innovation" at their pace. If you are more interested in running a business cost effectively (with no "drama") than running a high profile IT department (lots of drama) this was a very effective solution. The guy behind the I Series division went to Apple, as described in "Startup: A Silicon Valley adventure," which is an insiders view of the Go corporation. 

This is the "Benigh monopoly" argument. "Yes we charged you through the nose to run MS software, and yes the processors runs software (on non-intel architure processors oddly enough) that you cannot audit and yes we have probally stiffled innovation that would have helped the users but just look at how many transistors we put on the chips"

The argument for "monoculture" in any environment (space launch with EELV, politics in China and the x86 architecture to think of 3 off the top of my head) is always  the same. 
Monocultures promote stability and predicatabililty. That's it.

There weaknesses are also the same.
No pressure to innovate means inefficient (in whatever way you're measuring "efficiency") methods are either retained long after they should have been replaced or better ways are not developed at all. In the US launch environment context this would the ULA behavior toward NSS launch, regardless of wheather the actual rocket was a Titan or an Atlas. Also IIRC NASA was the last major user of "lock wire" on fasteners.

No cost containment. You pay whatever they charge. You have no choice. Use them or do without (or move to another country).

"Success" is measured in non-standard ways. EG "I rose 3 ranks in management, who cares how many payloads we launched last month. None of them could be shipped on any other vehicle and the customers know it" as an imaginary (for now)  example, of "success"

Single points of failure. With no diversity all such systems (hardware, software, political) are prone to common-mode failures. When it happens the only option is to shut the whole system down, because there is no backup systems.

BTW I didn't realise that in agriculture when they say they grow "wheat" this now means exactly a single specific variety, possibly a single specific variant of a variety. What happens if a pest/virus/infection develops that loves to devour your ultra-super-duper efficient wheat? Better keep dousing it with those chems. Again there is no backup.

None of this is a secret. None of this is unknown. They are simply the consequences of a monopoly. If you let one form that's what you will get. If people are OK with that fine.

There's a thesis on epilepsy in neural networks and the author stated that epilepsy is an outcome of connectivity, not of the hardware the neurons are made of. IOW you could see epilepsy in artificial neural networks, just as you see it in humans. 
It's not about the hardware, it's about the structure of the system itself.

You hope SX pricing will be very reasonable.

As they say in the hedge fund business "Hope is a very poor hedge" 

But we'll find out.

[john smith 19]

Sigh. This is high school level economics. A theoretical monopoly in a pure market with demand elasticity will set the price to maximize total profit. If a lower price attracts more customers, then the monopoly may lower the price. Decrease profit margin but increase total profit. Reality is more complicated but the principle applies.

And as has been noted before the space launch market is neither "pure" nor "elastic". 

If I have a 2 tonne comm sat that has to be in GEO to replace my current one I can't chop it up and launch it as a string of rideshares each with an independent propulsion system for example. I need what I need and only those LVs that can do that will be adequate. 

[john smith 19]

There is apparently a taxonomy of satellites, and "smallsat" tops out at 1200 kg.
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_satellite
The existing Starlinks are smallsats, but they and all other existing constellations were designed before Starship. It turns out that bigger satellites are preferable if you can pay for them, ans that's why the Starship version of Starlink gen 2 will be about 1400 kg.

I did not know this.  I'd guess an awful lot of the stufff we've seen would technically be in the mini-sat class.
The USAF team that built a satellite out of using all the 6 attachment points on an EELV payload adaptor was IMHO very clever, and I'm surprised it hasn't been used more often.

[john smith 19]

I think you’re trying to make a point that’s not really relevant to the thread and purely conjecture on your part. The Transporter program has induced demand into the launch market. That’s shows that, regardless of the theoretical impact of Starship on, the small sat launch market (you know what this thread is about) is in fact not a fixed pie.

Good point. I've always had trouble with "10Bn" figure because it seems to include the cost of the launch vehicles as well, which are a)Very expensive b)Generally expendable c)Have fairly low reliability (by the standard of every other for-profit transportation system on this planet  ) A vehicle that was 10% of the price  of existing LV's would (in principle) make the market look like it was shrinking unless it lead to massive payload growth to offset the drop in prices.

Which makes me smell a king-size rat in this description. 

So that demonstrates (some) market elasticity in this sector of the market. IE satellites being built which would not otherwise be built.

Will that stimulate other mfgs to revise their systems to make them competitive at this price? Or will new entrants who want to be in the smallsat LV need to factor in this price in future? The former is likely to be difficult. The latter OTOH should be SOP for any current generation LV startup.

For the foreseeable future this pricing will be the new reality.

[DanClemmensen]

Sigh. This is high school level economics. A theoretical monopoly in a pure market with demand elasticity will set the price to maximize total profit. If a lower price attracts more customers, then the monopoly may lower the price. Decrease profit margin but increase total profit. Reality is more complicated but the principle applies.

And as has been noted before the space launch market is neither "pure" nor "elastic". 

If I have a 2 tonne comm sat that has to be in GEO to replace my current one I can't chop it up and launch it as a string of rideshares each with an independent propulsion system for example. I need what I need and only those LVs that can do that will be adequate. 

Agreed. I basically dismissed all small launchers because I think Starship will kill them. I was thinking in terms of SpaceX's pricing of a single Starship launch. That launch will cost the same for a 1 kg payload or a 150 tonne payload. The question is how will they set their price?

[RedLineTrain]

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is made out of smallsats. SpaceX launches them in a cluster with extremely low marginal cost, even lower than Transporter. If SpaceX didn’t offer cluster launching to other smallsats, you could credibly accuse them of uncompetitive behavior. They’ve even launched some other megaconstellation satellites this way, I think Boeing’s constellation project has launched one or two prototypes on Transporter?

Sucks if you made a business on a dead end approach like expendable small lift launch (while poo-pooing larger lift and reusability the whole time), but being uncompetitive against better technology that far better serves the overall market need is your own fault. It’s good that the market culls dead end technology. And it’s massively good for the much larger (and higher revenue) satellite industry that SpaceX doesn’t keep their reusable launch capability to themselves.

The future isn’t Astra or Vega, it’s Stoke.

I don't know Stoke's approach (am sure I would wish them well), but the market dynamics of reusability are unforgiving in the extreme.  If SpaceX thinks its smallsat customers aren't filling its manifest sufficiently, it can continue down the path of megaconstellation hosted payloads and condosats.

[Robotbeat]

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is made out of smallsats. SpaceX launches them in a cluster with extremely low marginal cost, even lower than Transporter. If SpaceX didn’t offer cluster launching to other smallsats, you could credibly accuse them of uncompetitive behavior. They’ve even launched some other megaconstellation satellites this way, I think Boeing’s constellation project has launched one or two prototypes on Transporter?

There is apparently a taxonomy of satellites, and "smallsat" tops out at 1200 kg.
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_satellite
The existing Starlinks are smallsats, but they and all other existing constellations were designed before Starship. It turns out that bigger satellites are preferable if you can pay for them, ans that's why the Starship version of Starlink gen 2 will be about 1400 kg.

So again, where Falcon 9 is concerned, it’s primarily launching smallsats for SpaceX. John Smith is mad that they’re also launching smallsats for other people, even though if they didn’t it would raise anti-trust questions. Can’t win either way heh

[Robotbeat]

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is made out of smallsats. SpaceX launches them in a cluster with extremely low marginal cost, even lower than Transporter. If SpaceX didn’t offer cluster launching to other smallsats, you could credibly accuse them of uncompetitive behavior. They’ve even launched some other megaconstellation satellites this way, I think Boeing’s constellation project has launched one or two prototypes on Transporter?

Sucks if you made a business on a dead end approach like expendable small lift launch (while poo-pooing larger lift and reusability the whole time), but being uncompetitive against better technology that far better serves the overall market need is your own fault. It’s good that the market culls dead end technology. And it’s massively good for the much larger (and higher revenue) satellite industry that SpaceX doesn’t keep their reusable launch capability to themselves.

The future isn’t Astra or Vega, it’s Stoke.

I don't know Stoke's approach (am sure I would wish them well), but the market dynamics of reusability are unforgiving in the extreme.  If SpaceX thinks its smallsat customers aren't filling its manifest sufficiently, it can continue down the path of megaconstellation hosted payloads and condosats.

and, of course, that would ALSO be smallsat as Starlink (until starship becomes operational) is made entirely of smallsats.

Stoke is not a small lift launch vehicle, by the way. It’s medium lift (between 2 tons and 20 tons, the technical definition of medium lift).

[Robotbeat]

I think you’re trying to make a point that’s not really relevant to the thread and purely conjecture on your part. The Transporter program has induced demand into the launch market. That’s shows that, regardless of the theoretical impact of Starship on, the small sat launch market (you know what this thread is about) is in fact not a fixed pie.

Good point. I've always had trouble with "10Bn" figure because it seems to include the cost of the launch vehicles as well, which are a)Very expensive b)Generally expendable c)Have fairly low reliability (by the standard of every other for-profit transportation system on this planet  ) A vehicle that was 10% of the price  of existing LV's would (in principle) make the market look like it was shrinking unless it lead to massive payload growth to offset the drop in prices.

Which makes me smell a king-size rat in this description. 

So that demonstrates (some) market elasticity in this sector of the market. IE satellites being built which would not otherwise be built.

Will that stimulate other mfgs to revise their systems to make them competitive at this price? Or will new entrants who want to be in the smallsat LV need to factor in this price in future? The former is likely to be difficult. The latter OTOH should be SOP for any current generation LV startup.

For the foreseeable future this pricing will be the new reality.

I hope Starship kills the idea of spending a ton of money to make yet another expendable launcher. That SHOULD die. Creative destruction and all that.

Something like Stoke, however, could easily give Starship a run for its money on smaller payloads (up to medium lift). The heatshield tech is metallic so in principle should have much lower turnaround costs on a per launch basis (starship’s ceramic shuttle-like heatshield is gonna have headaches, especially due to how much acreage of TPS there is).

The solution to far better tech is not to whine and complain while doubling down on dead end expendable tech. These same folks were not too long ago proudly proclaiming how superior the expendable approach was compared to reusable (etc). It’s hard to feel too bad for them now that their approach is being proven insufficient.

[DanClemmensen]

Something like Stoke, however, could easily give Starship a run for its money on smaller payloads (up to medium lift). The heatshield tech is metallic so in principle should have much lower turnaround costs on a per launch basis.

We keep circling back to this. Starship does not need to compete on a launch-for-launch basis for smaller payloads, because the huge majority of smaller payloads are perfectly happy to be aggregated. Stoke, et. at, must have a lower per-launch cost that Starship to compete at all, and this only lets them compete for the relatively small number of satellites that are willing to pay a premium for a dedicated launch. In today's world, the instant you say "constellation" you are talking mostly about dedicated payloads.