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https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20200001093
Why do you lie?
I'd wager mainly because there is no competition, and there is no motivation for SpaceX to charge less.
The cost for regular launches has gone down a lot. But, to be fair, it has not gone down nearly as far as it could. SpaceX still has big margins there. I assume because again there is too little competition, and because going from 60 to 25 Million doesn't increase the potential market by all that much, so no huge motivation to drop prices.
Starship might allow them to go so much lower that entirely new markets can emerge, but I'm skeptical.
It's a bit of a different story for rideshare missions, those do make it way, way cheaper to launch small satelites.
Probably to fuel the R&D cost
I think they still hope to achieve that in the future. It is just there are a lot of more critical milestones they need to hit first before they try to tackle that.
Due to massively inflating costs and a recent catastrophic failure, Boeing has a very uncertain future in the program.
I hope this helps!
Tesla sells EVs much cheaper in China than the US due to actual competition.
As much as I despise Elon Musk, the cost per kg to LEO has gone down a lot in recent years thanks to spacex.
IMO SpaceX is not an inane idea, though it's arguably insane from the perspective of the era when it was founded (2002-ish), but it definitely seems to have succeeded. Tesla might be in the same bucket. But everything else he's been involved with has either been a non-starter or turned to trash (see: Boring Company, Twitter, xAI, whatever the hell the flamethrower thing was, etc). My sense is that he's getting worse over time, as mental illness, delusions of grandeur, and/or yes-men he's been surrounding himself with increasingly cloud his judgement.