The cost of putting a kilogram into orbit has fallen by roughly an order of magnitude, driven almost entirely by reusable first stages and a launch cadence that would have been implausible fifteen years ago.
What that enabled
Constellations. When launch was expensive, a satellite had to be exquisite, individually built, and designed for a fifteen-year life, because replacing it was ruinous.
Cheap launch inverts that. Build many, accept shorter lifetimes, replace continuously, and improve the hardware each generation. The result is global broadband coverage from low orbit, which was economically impossible under the old cost structure.
What did not happen
Space manufacturing, tourism at scale, and asteroid mining all remain marginal. The constraint on those was never launch cost alone, and removing it revealed that the other obstacles were larger than assumed.
Launch was the bottleneck people could see. It was not the only one.
The crowding problem
Low Earth orbit now contains tens of thousands of tracked objects, and the operational satellite count has grown faster than the coordination frameworks governing it. Collision avoidance manoeuvres are routine.
The failure mode people worry about is a cascade in which debris generates more debris faster than it deorbits. It is not imminent and it is not implausible, and the mitigation – deorbit requirements, tracking, coordination between operators – is progressing more slowly than the deployment.
Astronomy’s complaint
Bright satellites crossing long exposures have become a genuine problem for ground-based observation. Operators have made real efforts to reduce reflectivity, with partial success. The trajectory of satellite numbers means the problem grows regardless.
The underrated effect
Earth observation. Continuous, high-resolution, frequently updated imagery of the entire planet is now commercially available, which changes agriculture, shipping, insurance, and conflict monitoring in ways that get far less attention than the rockets do.