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Space travel costs too much. I think we can all agree on this.

An argument I've seen around the internet is that a big part of the problem with space access costs is scale: there's just not enough demand for launch services to generate economies of scale, either by mass-producing cheap launch vehicles or by building larger launch vehicles (like Sea Dragon) or some combination of the two. What we really need, the argument runs, to bring the cost down is some organization - presumably the government - with the need to send a lot of payload into orbit, enough to justify cranking out launch vehicles like sausages.

Lacking the expertise to evaluate this idea myself, I thought I'd ask y'all: do you think this would actually work? And, if it would, what missions would both require enough launches to do the job, but would still be even theoretically politically feasible? Some kind of gold-plated orbital ABM system is the only thing that comes to mind, but maybe someone else has a better idea.
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