> So your argument is...
Well, I made no such argument, the GGP did, and I'll quote:
> Look at the numbers. SpaceX is doing it’s thing for a few billion a year. That’s chump change compared to the money being spent on, let’s say professional basketball.
... but I think if the poster wants to make the argument about relative costs they should at least make a fair assessment.
> First of all, just because the trend is exponential now doesn't mean it always will be. That's silly.
Silly why? Silly as the amount of processors that are sold every year?[0] How would a 'wealth creating' technology reaching economies of scale with a variety of use-cases not continue to grow? It is possible there's some sort of saturation point... but I can only see space industry as something that will spur it's own demand by creating industries that never existed before.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266973/global-semiconduc...
> Second of all, the number of launches may be increasing at that rate because the launches have been made exponentially cheaper - why don't we look at % of GDP being put into space flight? I bet it would be flat or trending down.
And I was wondering if someone would make this argument, because it is flawed. Even if costs do 'reduce exponentially' they are reducing towards a lower limit, not to zero. At some point the cost reductions per year will start to become insignificant, much in the same way that regular flight isn't becoming exponentially more economical every year. So after the low-hanging fruit has been tackled (e.g., rocket re-use, mass production), the number of launches will correlate pretty well with costs, especially now that a whole bunch of use cases now become profitable.