This is a great example of economies of scale and of learning curves. Flying big, flying often leads to coat reductions and safety improvements that make it easier to fly bigger and more often.

It would be interesting to see a chart of $/kg ovr time, perhaps with the introduction of various new rockets marked.

Amigo, the difference is that with the public/private model the USA uses is that overall costs are greatly obscured across all 4 layers of US government layer cake (subsidies and tax breaks across: municipal, county, state, national levels). Especially since in the USA and SpaceX the infra is also privatized not just the vehicles. The paper doesn't mention what all is included in their headline launch cost estimates.

Hence me asking the question. Since you obviously can't answer the question, or else you would have, have a great day.

The costs are not obscured. Government contracts are public records. Anyone who has spent anytime looking into can see clearly that SpaceX has had far less government subsidy than any launch provider in history. But you just keep "Asking Questions".

This is one of many areas that the EU is learning the true cost of American dependency and what that means when the United States becomes a less than dependable partner.

The good thing is that they clearly have the technical capability, but to date have been sorely lacking the full will and commitment.

Clearly Europe has the technical capability to be competitive, as can be seen with the success story of Airbus but they've had a massive failure of leadership and ambition. The direction of travel was obvious 10 years ago, and it feels like Europe is no closer to having a Falcon 9 competitor in 2026 vs 2016.

For national payload, like big comm satellite, observation satellites, militaries, the cost per Kg is not that much of deal.

I don't think this is correct at all, or at least, it's true only within some narrow band.

I mean, if you think otherwise, it means you think the US could not afford to launch stuff in space prior to the past 10 years.

The US absolutely could not afford to launch THIS MUCH STUFF in space prior to the past 10 years (and further, the geopolitical security situation has changed fairly radically). Military advantage is a relative, not just absolute, quantity. If your opponents' abilities and stances evolve yours must as well. If one side can afford to launch literally orders of magnitude more, that opens up entire new capabilities that the other side just cannot match. Genuine paradigm shifts are rare, but they can happen and we're clearly witnessing some right now. Not having any sort of operational equivalency doesn't instantly mean loss, but it can definitely mean that victory is a lot more costly.

Higher cost does not directly means Europe has no access to space. It mostly affect private orgs that would want to launch, like private comm constellations.

Starlink has shown itself to be incredibly militarily valuable and that area is still only just getting going. And remember it's not just "higher cost" it's cadence and absolute volume/mass as well. With Starship, the US will be able to launch surveillance, comms, and other orbital systems that are literally physically impossible for Europe to launch itself for any amount of money, and will be able to do it rapidly (which can mean both volume and on a dime). Clever software can let you squeeze out some more performance, but at some point there's no substitute for just having a bigger mirror or antenna, and more of them, overhead all the time, far closer to target, iterated way more quickly, and with more power+compute. That's setting aside de novo stuff, like whether or not the US actually goes through with it Starship at least makes feasible contemplating suborbital/orbital drops of supplies or weapons, and probably other stuff we're not even considering.

If Europe had made real strides in the last decade in terms of catching up to at least F9 that'd be something, but the situation they're in right now is actually not great. And the thing as well is nobody can just wake up tomorrow and be like "I guess we need to have a medium/heavy lift reusable rocket in six months let's just do that", it takes longer than that.

Think what you will about China - politics, human rights, industrial espionage, environmental policy, etc . When it comes to just getting stuff done, they are impressive. I don’t think emulating their approach is wise, but nobody should underestimate them as competitors.

While not an unusual take in other areas, it is kind of a weird take in an article on America completely dominating isn't it? Yes it's to China's credit they're now pivoting and trying to catch up far far harder than Europe, but it's still over 10 years after F9's first landing and we're still in a situation where nobody else is doing it yet (though China seems quite close). Europe didn't and doesn't need to emulate China to be more decisive, just America with tweaks.