And of course Blue Origin has a lot riding on this as well :-) If SpaceX can get the heavy operational before BO gets the New Glenn operational, its going to be that much harder for Bezos to find any customers left for his rocket.
I'm wondering if there is a 'Space Market Outlook 2020 and beyond' report by some research agency I could peruse.
There are multiple companies trying to build constellations requiring 1000s of satellites. These are in planning both for communication and for earth imaging.
There are of course ongoing launches for government, GPS, military, NASA supply, probes and so on. There are also many other governments globally that want their own communications, and very often the launch on commercial providers.
Both SpaceX and BlueOrigin have plans to do tourist launches and if the rockets are as reusable as we hope they are, the cost of these could drop where is is at least another piece in the demand that allows the price to drop.
Many of these companies also have their own plans that will require some amount of launches.
Longer terms mining and manufacturing could be interesting as well.
You can find a lot of these analysis all over the place. Of course depending on who is sponsoring them the market is either huge or non existent.
"Shotwell said SpaceX is “investing hundreds of millions” of dollars into production capacity for Falcon 9, and that the company also invested at this high level last year.
“We will definitely catch up,” she said. " -- http://spacenews.com/shotwell-on-spacex-launch-backlog-we-wi...
They anticipate getting time to re-fly down around 24 hrs for a F9 booster. I'm just wondering what happens if we have something that has never existed ever in the world before, excess launch capacity. What is the clearing price for that? If SpaceX really gets it down to $10 - $15M/launch just how many things can you put up there?
Looking for 'launch backlog' or 'launch capacity forecast' or 'space launch business outlook' are remarkably ill served by Google's index. This is probably the best result -- https://brycetech.com/downloads/Commercial_Space_Transportat... and it is pretty thin.
Why? I agree that demand will go up with an decrease in costs but I see no reason why they would not price their offerings in such a way that they maximize ROI, IE, not so cheap that they will be turning customers away, just expensive enough to match what the market will bear.
The only thing that would cause them to turn customers away is when there is a shortage of launch capacity at a set price-point, the solution then is to raise the price.
Given the lower costs of the re-usable platform one would hope we could effectively address some of the space junk issues.
But that isn't really "private space flight" where I imagine tourists flying up to Bigelow inflated habititats for a three day stay where couples can experiment with zero g sex after getting over their motion sickness issues. That market seems a bit fanciful yet.
http://spacenews.com/blue-origin-signs-up-third-customer-for...