2. Cost of launch locks out potential customers and limits R&D uses. Global launch cadence is slow; getting into orbit is a multi-year adventure.
3. Yes, we're working on reusable rockets.
However, this only goes so far. Personally, I think that more money needs to be put into non-rocket modes of space travel, so that there's some competition. The fundamental problem is that it takes so much energy (and, with rockets, so much mass fraction optimization) to get to space, so it's difficult to engineer things with physical margin.
If you could build a rocket like a car (just toss some more steel in the frame and call it a day, with no need for the obsessive mass savings), getting to space would be a bit easier. If you had a power source that doesn't shake and bake its surroundings, getting to space would be a lot easier.
Take a look at the development of cubesats [1]. It's a new "paradigm" for LEO sats: rather than develop a massive and/or complex sat with a lifetime spanning decades, costing years & millions of dollars, you can now make a simpler (no station keeping ability other than using drag, lifetime so low that radiation hardening isn't worth it)/cheaper/lighter sat that you'll replace in a couple of years.
See also these two SpaceX applications to the FCC from 2016 & 2017 [2][3] for respectively ~4000 and ~7000 satellites. For context, there is currently about ~1000 operational satellites, with about half of these in LEO.
Finally consider the Ardusat project [4] from a couple of years ago (the premise was to send an arduino in space and let kickstarter backers run their code on it). The project was successful and allowed the founders to later raise money for a company [5] (Nanosatisfi, renamed Spire) operating a fleet of cubesats.
Basically any entity with ~100k to spend will be able to send up their own space junk. Now would be a good time to figure out how to treat the kessler syndrome.
2. Cost of launch locks out potential customers and limits R&D uses. Global launch cadence is slow; getting into orbit is a multi-year adventure.
3. Yes, we're working on reusable rockets.
However, this only goes so far. Personally, I think that more money needs to be put into non-rocket modes of space travel, so that there's some competition. The fundamental problem is that it takes so much energy (and, with rockets, so much mass fraction optimization) to get to space, so it's difficult to engineer things with physical margin.
If you could build a rocket like a car (just toss some more steel in the frame and call it a day, with no need for the obsessive mass savings), getting to space would be a bit easier. If you had a power source that doesn't shake and bake its surroundings, getting to space would be a lot easier.