You are a perfect example of that.
The reason spaceflight has “stupidly” been done with expendable vehicles- like Soyuz- all these years is that you cannot build something lightweight that will survive the vibration, stresses, extremes of temperature, and working pressures and be in any condition to be used again. Not without spending more money tearing it apart, inspecting, and rebuilding it again for more money than it cost to make brand new.
Like a soda can.
Scratched, dented, the pop top popped, residue inside, thrown onto the road. You can recover the can, carefully (very carefully) repair the dents, completely scrape off the paint and repaint it, meticulously clean and sterilize the inside, replace the pop top by removing, brazing, and pressing a new one on, etc.
Or you can just forget about it and continue to punch out new ones at the factory.

You might not agree with this analogy but the weight factor is not debatable. The weight of recovery devices, even simple parachutes, eats into the payload. Making a capsule reusable may have advantages, but sticking wings, control systems, airframe and landing gear on it so it can land like an airplane has been proven to be a dead end. And unless some unobtainium is found in regards to propulsion or the laws of physics change, it will stay this way.
The precise launch vehicle is all important, and your competitive procurement is inherently flawed because it does not choose the best, it accepts the cheapest.

Even if this were true for manned spaceflight (which it wouldn’t be, unless you stupidly used expendable spacecraft), it would merely state that the precise launch vehicle isn’t important, which means we should prefer competitive procurement with multiple simultaneous suppliers, not a dedicated vehicle. The nonsense people come up with when they have an agenda…

And with reusable spacecraft it would be. Stephen is merely describing why using expendable manned spacecraft is such a bad idea. A bad idea that his favourite launch vehicle requires in order to get enough payloads.

You continue to repeat this as though it’s relevant to human deep-space exploration. It is not. When the vast majority of your payload is propellant, launch costs become very important.

Let’s hear about them. And note that the same goes for existing ELVs, which have the advantage of well, existing. And being paid for already.

I mean do we really need to map every rock in our solar system down to 1mm resolution? Is that what the next fifty years of space exploration is going to be about? Having significantly higher resolution images of other bodies in the solar system than our own sea floor? I think the two most profound questions that we should and can answer in the next fifty years will be has a second genesis occurred in our solar system and is there life on other planets in our galaxy. Answering these questions will require more volume, larger diameters and higher throw masses than launch systems, optimized to put up communication/earth remote sensing satellites, can deliver. It’s entirely understandable as to why launch service providers think their systems are adequate because this is the mission type that dominates their demand. I would suggest though that just because you sell hammers doesn’t mean everything a nail.

The entire worldwide space industry is about $250 Billion dollars. The launch services industry worldwide is about $20 Billion. What more do you need to know than that with regards to where to look in order to find out why space is so expensive? I’m being generous when I say that launch cost is less than 20% of the total lifecycle cost.

If anything what drives for profit users of space crazy is getting bumped by late national security launches that can also then interact with time critical civilian launches. Adding an extra 6 months to their cash flow projections (ie the other 80% of their business case) can make the difference between making and losing money on their investments.

Seems to me to be perfectly good reason as to why commercial users of launch systems should be paying only the incremental cost and not the fixed cost since the government will and should have bumping rights. The government pays the premium price (fixed plus incremental) because they have priority when push comes to shove.

“Given all the benefits of new breakthrough Commercial, Civilian and Military mission that the $900 million buys us…”

As Byeman pointed out, the commercial satellite market is not demanding bigger launchers at this point, and are not utilizing the capabilities of the largest launchers either.

Last year the 12th World Market Survey of satellite construction and launch trends, produced by Euroconsult of Paris, had this to say:

“Taking all markets – commercial, civil government and military – combined, the average satellite mass is likely to drop by 5 percent, to 4,166 pounds (1,890 kg), in the coming 10 years compared to the previous period, Euroconsult concludes.

The average satellite price over the next decade will be $99 million, compared to $97 million in the past 10 years. The per-satellite launch price is predicted to remain flat, at $51 million, according to Euroconsult.”

I saw a similar study that was released by the U.S. government covering the same period, and it was pretty close, especially about the predicted satellite size.

So a couple of points:

– Launch costs are not insignificant WRT to the total cost of the satellite.

– Satellite makers are not going to rush to produce larger satellites if an HLV is available.

So where are all the Delta IV heavy missions if this were true. The US is not even using all the capabilities of existing vehicles, so why should it need a bigger one.

The JWST issue is volume and not lift capability. Existing vehicles can be fitted with larger fairings. SLS is not need to fix JWST

1. The military is not going to use SLS.
2. the US can not afford unmanned spacecraft that could fly on SLS.
3. Most spacecraft don’t have tight margins.

“prevent us from going with higher margin, lower cost, lower tech, more capable missions ”

because there is no such thing. Cassini didn’t have tight margins. They could always off load propellant. Same goes for MRO, Juno, MSL. A larger launch vehicle would not make these cheaper.