When you're launching a $2B satellite, saving $60mm on the launch is not a slam-dunk. The Air Force had a series of launch failures that made them extremely conservative. Sure, I think they ought to be moving faster with SpaceX, but you should give them credit for having some serious concerns.
A lot of that $2B cost comes from requirement that everything should just work, and therefore thoroughly tested, because customers don't want to have it broken in space where no one can fix things and have to send another one... which costs $2B... see cyclical reasoning? If launches would be cheaper, customers could afford to make less expensive payloads - after all, if it breaks, they can just send another one.
A primary reason why payloads are so expensive is because launch services - used to be - so expensive. With lowering the launch price payloads can become cheaper.
The situation today is that the Air Force has a $2B satellite to launch soon that they ordered a decade ago.
You're right that tomorrow, a different one could be built with the new launch cost in mind. The entire "new space" movement revolves around lowering launch costs and building much cheaper satellites to take advantage of lower launch costs.
That's not entirely correct. The bottom line is that military satellites are just expensive - period. They will always be expensive because of their capabilities.
Not all military satellites require some outstanding capabilities - and military does launch cubesats and other small-scale devices today. Reminding that if 50 years ago military requests pushed boundaries of technology, today commercial applications are so demanding - and command such a large market - that it is military devices which piggyback on RND results of commercial ones.
Yes, you may always want a unique, expensive, cutting edge satellite. But you won't always need that - military doesn't directly set the goal to spend as much as possible. X-37 demonstrates a lot of capabilities while being much cheaper than previous reusable space vehicle. So with launch costs going down other, cheaper opportunities open - to everybody, including military. That's beside the idea that cheaper rocket doesn't mean worse rocket, reminding Japanese cars of few decades back.
Agreed. They will always have more capability than a non-military satellite, and so will be more expensive. If it didn't have more capability than a non-military satellite, then it isn't a military satellite.
I meant it had to be different to non-military satellites in some important ways. Otherwise it'd be just a non-military satellite. Imagine buying a consumer-grade computer. It's cheap to get one with 16gb ram, but if you want a 64gb ram one, it would probably vastly more than the 64/16=4 times as expensive. Each step you go out of the non-military satellite capability curve (with multiple dimension including features, reliability), it gets exponentially more expensive. If the a research-grade computer wasn't different from a consumer-grade computer in some aspect (by having a lot of ram, cores, processing speed), it would just be a consumer-grade computer.
A computer that is substantially cheaper would be hobbyist-grade computer.
Of course I'm only talking about traditional military rather than forces like A* Qda which might make do with whatever they can get their hands on, which is probably what you're referring to.
I suppose a very cheap satellite could be terrorist-grade. ;)
Yes, except currently military radars and GPSes are more expensive and more capable than versions you can buy in the shop. Same applies for Humvees, Tanks, guns, and even malware. All of the ones used by the military and intelligence agencies cost vastly more to buy and at the same time have more capability than their corresponding consumer versions. So it's only a symmetric argument if you view "military" and "consumer" as symbols in a program without any of the background context, which I did not intend for you to do.
