In the closing decades of the last century and the first decades of this one, the average cost of launching a kilogram into Earth orbit simply would not change. The price stubbornly hovered above $10,000, and new idea after new idea failed to break the impasse.This stymied innovation-after all, if it's expensive to launch something, it becomes tricky to take other kinds of risks. But opinion was split: Had things stagnated because there was never enough money to see ideas through? Or was it because other improvements-in, say, materials science or autonomous navigation-were insufficiently mature?All that has changed in the last few years as new craft broke the deadlock, most notably SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, which is about a tenth as costly, per kilogram, as its closest competitor.
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