> At this point, the entire SpaceX project is a bet on telecommunications services, specifically direct-to-satellite handheld Internet. That's the only market that will recoup the program costs.

There's also a military angle here. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look into Musk's history with Michael D. Griffin from the Reagan SDI/'Star Wars' program.

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amluto 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s an awkward comparison, but F9 can deliver a payload to orbit at a slightly lower price per kg than a Tomahawk missile can deliver it to a target. Starship would be MUCH cheaper if the economics works out the way that SpaceX would like it to.

Obviously a few hundred kg of payload in orbit are not equivalent to the same payload delivered directly to a target.

	▲	mullingitover 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You don’t need very many kg delivered to target if it’s plutonium. The SDI program had the idea was that if you parked enough defensive weaponry in orbit then maybe mutually assured destruction wasn’t something you had to worry about. The only problem was that getting all that mass into orbit was prohibitively expensive. Then the deputy director of the program met a young man named Elon Musk, and the rest is history.