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With the recent landing of SpaceX's Falcon 9 first stage, there is the potential that (rapid, economical) reusability will revolutionize spaceflight. There are some who doubt that, believing that reusable rockets would not affect the market enough to enable the large-scale utilization of space. There are also some who believe that it will be a major "game-changer" that will make Elon Musk's ambitious Mars colonization plans possible.

Also, when discussing the economics of space launch vehicles, the term "flight rate" tends to come up - people say a high flight rate reduces per-launch costs by amortizing development costs and operating overhead. This is either thought to be achieved through high-flight-rate reusable launch systems, or mass produced expendable rockets. But there also needs to be demand for that flight rate. It's highly cliché, but "chicken-and-egg" is the phrase used to describe this situation, in which low launch costs need high flight rates, and high flight rates need low launch costs.

But could large-scale space activity have been possible years ago, if not for certain advances in electronics?

The Atomic Rockets website by Winchell Chung, and a person by the name of Isaac Kuo, has suggested that:
Isaac Kuo said:
It just occured to me...why didn't we have large scale commercialization of space already? And I had a strange answer:
The microchip and the fiber optic cable.

One of the few killer apps for space satellites was the communications satellite. But the microchip allowed multiplexing many voice streams onto a single high bandwidth signal, and the fiber optic cable made cheap long range high bandwidth communications possible.

What might have happened if the microchip and fiber optic cable weren't developed for another few decades? We might actually have needed hordes of communications satellites to keep up with global demand. That means a solid customer base for launchers, and that means mass produced launchers and/or big dumb boosters.

Without the microchip, these communications satellites suck up all sorts of juice. Thus, there's a huge incentive to develop efficient solar cells. With advanced space rated solar cells and cheaper launch technology, space based power may even be practical.

The result? Large scale industrialization of space, and sufficient economies of scale that launch costs are relatively cheap.
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