Why Did Cheap Satellites Make Launch Cost Matter?

Scott Nolan says a cheap satellite makes launch price the problem you can no longer ignore. A one hundred million dollar launch was acceptable beside a satellite that cost a billion dollars, and it has to be rethought once the satellite costs one million dollars.

The part of SpaceX he keeps is working on something not everyone agrees is the most important thing. He looks for industries that have not lived up to their promise over the last 50 years, then for the bottlenecks inside them. A market that already needs fixing can still be the right target when it is a big lever on a much bigger industry, even without a completely new greenfield. In the early 2000s, everybody was talking about modern satellites: how to do small satellites and how to do cube satellites. There was no good way for them to get to launch. A billion-dollar satellite can live with one hundred million dollars for a launch. At one million dollars, the launch price is what has to be thought through.