Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
We do not even have a mature TL7 space industry, much less a mature TL8 space industry, so everything is one off missions that cost 100x as much.
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Nobody has yet figured out much of a reason to go to space much more often than we do now. As much as I'd love to live in a scifi world of Pan Am flights leaving for the moon five times a day, there's just right now not a profit in it. The production scales needed to substantially reduce production costs are unlikely to be supportable, even with the increased demand due to the reduced cost.
"Having a mature industry" and "being at a particular TL" are two different things. We have put ion engines into operation, and that is a TL8 technology. The fact that we haven't done it a lot of times doesn't mean we haven't reached TL8. By that logic, we might not even be up to TL7 rocketry because nobody made more than a handful of nuclear thermal rockets (and none flew).