The point is making orbital launches cheaper. Musk may have some further goals, but they will probably be irrelevant. Predicting the consequences of new technology is always difficult.
Falcon 9 was the first attempt to achieve this, but it failed. Apart from grabbing the majority of the commercial launch market, it didn't really change anything. The number of orbital launches per year is roughly the same it has been since the 1960s. Rockets are still expensive enough that you can't afford one unless you have a really valuable payload to launch.
Expensive but reliable rockets gave us useful things like communications satellites, GPS, and weather satellites. An order-of-magnitude reduction in launch costs may have given us slightly better satellite services (like Starlink) but nothing qualitatively different. Another order-of-magnitude reduction could plausibly bring bigger changes.
> Falcon 9 was the first attempt to achieve this, but it failed. Apart from grabbing the majority of the commercial launch market, it didn't really change anything. The number of orbital launches per year is roughly the same it has been since the 1960s.
Eh, but upmass is significantly up, despite it taking less mass to do stuff in space and stuff lasting longer.
Not to mention that it may take a long time from launch getting cheaper for payload to really start to take advantage of it. If launch stays sustainably cheap, it may be time to start analyzing the economics of space power stations, etc, again, which were almost feasible with worse technology at much higher launch costs.
Falcon 9 was the first attempt to achieve this, but it failed. Apart from grabbing the majority of the commercial launch market, it didn't really change anything. The number of orbital launches per year is roughly the same it has been since the 1960s. Rockets are still expensive enough that you can't afford one unless you have a really valuable payload to launch.
Expensive but reliable rockets gave us useful things like communications satellites, GPS, and weather satellites. An order-of-magnitude reduction in launch costs may have given us slightly better satellite services (like Starlink) but nothing qualitatively different. Another order-of-magnitude reduction could plausibly bring bigger changes.