Is competition speeding things up?

[AncientU]

Elon was the first US player with capital to understand the impact of lower launch costs on enlarging the market, a process that we are now seeing for the first time.

Except the market isn't enlarging, it's flat and forecast to contract in the next 10 years.

Which launch market are you describing here?
Is this forecast based on steady (or steadily increasing) launch prices?

[muomega0]

I immediately think of Henry Ford, recognizing that if he paid his workers a decent enough wage, that they too could become customers who could afford to buy his mass-produced assembly line vehicles.

At the risk of going a bit off-topic, I don't think that old story is true.  Ford did raise his wages, but it doesn't make sense that he'd do it in the hope that his own workers would spend some small fraction of their extra pay buying his product.

If memory serves, the real reason was to reduce training costs due to rapid turnover.  Higher wages kept workers around longer, which increased their productivity enough to be worth the higher wages.

I'd guess that the cost of finding and training workers is a big part of what's keeping their payscale up in the space industry today.  Elon Musk probably doesn't expect his engineers to buy F9s.

you may want to visit the Henry Ford Museum or read a few books on Ford.  Many state it was his greatest invention.

In the strictest sense, if every employee simply bought a car with the increased wage, its likely only to break even at best....a flat non expanding market.

Henry Ford Doubles the Minimum Wage

Ford believed he was buying higher quality work from all his employees. “If the floor sweeper’s heart is in his job he can save us five dollars a day by picking up small tools instead of sweeping them out.”

“The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, and unless an industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers. One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.”

It might have been just another of Ford’s wild ideas, except that it proved successful. In 1914, the company sold 308,000 of its Model Ts—more than all other carmakers combined. By 1915, sales had climbed to 501,000. By 1920, Ford was selling a million cars a year.

“We increased the buying power of our own people, and they increased the buying power of other people, and so on and on,” Ford wrote. “It is this thought of enlarging buying power by paying high wages and selling at low prices that is behind the prosperity of this country.”

Ford told Garrett, “When business thought only of profit for the owners ‘instead of providing goods for all,’ then it frequently broke down.”

the exact opposite of trickle down....

Musk may want them to buy the new, not 100K, Tesla in few years....and a F9 later on..perhaps a ride on a reuseable F9 in between, but Musk likely knows they could not if it was kept expendable 
---

Competition means duplication and multiple competing parallel programs (e.g. Apollo) is expensive and the short time frame eliminated many options not ready for a less than decade goal.  The alternative is to pick winners and reduce the number of parallel paths eliminating the duplication, and providing adequate cash to speed up the 'winning', early selected option.  There are many cases where a slower speed results in a cheaper end result.  Only those with deep pockets have entered the 'competition'..do they have all the ideas?

[AncientU]

<snip>
The alternative is to pick winners and reduce the number of parallel paths eliminating the duplication, and providing adequate cash to speed up the 'winning', early selected option.  There are many cases where a slower speed results in a cheaper end result.  Only those with deep pockets have entered the 'competition'..do they have all the ideas?

So long as you correctly pick the winners.
Command economies are a vast trove of evidence that we (humanity) are not good at doing this.

[A_M_Swallow]

<snip>
The alternative is to pick winners and reduce the number of parallel paths eliminating the duplication, and providing adequate cash to speed up the 'winning', early selected option.  There are many cases where a slower speed results in a cheaper end result.  Only those with deep pockets have entered the 'competition'..do they have all the ideas?

So long as you correctly pick the winners.
Command economies are a vast trove of evidence that we (humanity) are not good at doing this.

Governments tend to pick the biggest liar, the company paying the highest bribes followed by the loser who is threatening to fire workers. The loser can fire more workers in a week than a growing company hires in its first decade.

[AncientU]

<snip>
The alternative is to pick winners and reduce the number of parallel paths eliminating the duplication, and providing adequate cash to speed up the 'winning', early selected option.  There are many cases where a slower speed results in a cheaper end result.  Only those with deep pockets have entered the 'competition'..do they have all the ideas?

There are many more cases where a slower speed results in a more expensive result.
The space industry is a study in such cost increases.

I'd suggest casting a wide net for entrants and ideas, kinda like being done in CRS plus Crew for ISS, and let ideas and results 'pick the winners.'  One day, USG can be out of the loop as is now the case in the satellite market.

[erioladastra]

<snip>
The alternative is to pick winners and reduce the number of parallel paths eliminating the duplication, and providing adequate cash to speed up the 'winning', early selected option.  There are many cases where a slower speed results in a cheaper end result.  Only those with deep pockets have entered the 'competition'..do they have all the ideas?

There are many more cases where a slower speed results in a more expensive result.
The space industry is a study in such cost increases.

I'd suggest casting a wide net for entrants and ideas, kinda like being done in CRS plus Crew for ISS, and let ideas and results 'pick the winners.'  One day, USG can be out of the loop as is now the case in the satellite market.

One detail not hit upon in this thread...   is that the more providers there are the more of a strain there is on NASA to work with all of them.  It takes a fair amount of resources for review and partnering with all the companies.  This does slow the process down.  I won't say it is the biggest drag but it is measureable.  Besides not having the resources to complete a review on time, you can miss stuff and is one factor in why requirements continue to change, which itself introduces further changes.

[sanman]

At the risk of going a bit off-topic, I don't think that old story is true.  Ford did raise his wages, but it doesn't make sense that he'd do it in the hope that his own workers would spend some small fraction of their extra pay buying his product.

If memory serves, the real reason was to reduce training costs due to rapid turnover.  Higher wages kept workers around longer, which increased their productivity enough to be worth the higher wages.

I'd guess that the cost of finding and training workers is a big part of what's keeping their payscale up in the space industry today.  Elon Musk probably doesn't expect his engineers to buy F9s.

Alright, but at least Musk has made some comforting comments about not treating the launch market like a "rug bazaar" whereby you try to wring out as much payment from your customer as you can get away with.

I assume it was Steve Jobs who came up with the low-cost "app pricing" model in Apple's app store, figuring that by pricing apps very low, that it would encourage many more to make purchases.

I'm then wondering what the key thresholds are for price, which if broken through would put launch services within reach of whole new groups of customers who previously couldn't afford such services.