First, welcome. Always good to have new perspectives in the forum.
Yeah, there's definitely some startups basing their future on SS, though not nearly enough to drive any kind of SS demand or development timeline. AST is probably the biggest "gotta have SS" right now--the big mountain for them is that there's zero chance their business model closes without the aspirational mass-to-orbit price of SS. If SS doesn't achieve the aspirational $$$, AST is going to have a hard time.
Tough place to be for them.
I think the big question mark here is how the [theoretical] significant reduction in launch cost actually gets realized as game-changing program cost reduction by a customer. Because the launch portion of a program cost is so low to begin with (call it 10-20%), that's simply not where the real savings is going to come from. The ground segment also makes up a reasonable chunk of a program (real hand-wavey, call it the ~same as the launch segment), so there's not a hug opportunity there unless someone is building out a massive ground network with internally built equipment (like Starlink). The satellite segment is the biggest piece of the pie, and parts make up a significant portion of that piece--for traditional space programs, 75% or so of the total satellite segment cost is the bill of materials for the sats, or near as makes no difference for this convo, ~half of a program's total cost.
That's the big egg that everyone in the industry is trying to crack. Obviously SX has done it, but also at significant internal expense and on a pretty indeterminant timeline, and a (and probably the) significant reason they can bring the BOM cost way down is because of the ginormous number of satellites they're building. One failure makes no difference to the constellation. (Obviously there's other big things, but I'm getting sidetracked...)
Anyway, save for Amazon...sort of...nobody else has the internal funding or the gumption to take that leap of faith and dump a truckload of investment into an idea like "send up a bunch of automotive grade and digikey parts and hope real hard that they last long enough", because everyone else has traditional beancounters controlling the money (and those kinds of folks aren't the kind of person that will just do whatever their CEO wants to do).
A telescope is actually a great thought experiment as a potential SS use case. If Webb is any indication we're at a point now where it's more useful to have multi-faceted primaries made up of more, smaller individual mirrors vs the single super-duper Hubble flavor. Because the multi-facet primary can be launched in something other than their operational configuration during launch, physical accommodation has become much less of a driving requirement. We're also going to get to a point fairly soon where on orbit assembly is tenable, so having the muti-faceted primaries in some tightly controlled stowed configuration during launch (like Webb) also isn't going to be absolutely necessary either.
What that means is getting a telescope up really becomes a mass problem and not a volume problem. Certainly a single SS can better deploy more mass vs multiple F9's (For instance), though given that the last big ass telescope that got built was $10B or something, an extra $50-100M or whatever to lift "more than Webb" mass on a 5m rocket isn't really moving any needles.
The farther future is likely a multi-vehicle telescope (rather than just a bigger aperture), where a number of satellites hundreds or thousands of miles apart with tightly monitored geometry create a massive sized virtual aperture...and that kind of concept also isn't significantly enabled by SS.
Yeah, there's definitely some startups basing their future on SS, though not nearly enough to drive any kind of SS demand or development timeline. AST is probably the biggest "gotta have SS" right now--the big mountain for them is that there's zero chance their business model closes without the aspirational mass-to-orbit price of SS. If SS doesn't achieve the aspirational $$$, AST is going to have a hard time.
Tough place to be for them.
I think the big question mark here is how the [theoretical] significant reduction in launch cost actually gets realized as game-changing program cost reduction by a customer. Because the launch portion of a program cost is so low to begin with (call it 10-20%), that's simply not where the real savings is going to come from. The ground segment also makes up a reasonable chunk of a program (real hand-wavey, call it the ~same as the launch segment), so there's not a hug opportunity there unless someone is building out a massive ground network with internally built equipment (like Starlink). The satellite segment is the biggest piece of the pie, and parts make up a significant portion of that piece--for traditional space programs, 75% or so of the total satellite segment cost is the bill of materials for the sats, or near as makes no difference for this convo, ~half of a program's total cost.
That's the big egg that everyone in the industry is trying to crack. Obviously SX has done it, but also at significant internal expense and on a pretty indeterminant timeline, and a (and probably the) significant reason they can bring the BOM cost way down is because of the ginormous number of satellites they're building. One failure makes no difference to the constellation. (Obviously there's other big things, but I'm getting sidetracked...)
Anyway, save for Amazon...sort of...nobody else has the internal funding or the gumption to take that leap of faith and dump a truckload of investment into an idea like "send up a bunch of automotive grade and digikey parts and hope real hard that they last long enough", because everyone else has traditional beancounters controlling the money (and those kinds of folks aren't the kind of person that will just do whatever their CEO wants to do).
A telescope is actually a great thought experiment as a potential SS use case. If Webb is any indication we're at a point now where it's more useful to have multi-faceted primaries made up of more, smaller individual mirrors vs the single super-duper Hubble flavor. Because the multi-facet primary can be launched in something other than their operational configuration during launch, physical accommodation has become much less of a driving requirement. We're also going to get to a point fairly soon where on orbit assembly is tenable, so having the muti-faceted primaries in some tightly controlled stowed configuration during launch (like Webb) also isn't going to be absolutely necessary either.
What that means is getting a telescope up really becomes a mass problem and not a volume problem. Certainly a single SS can better deploy more mass vs multiple F9's (For instance), though given that the last big ass telescope that got built was $10B or something, an extra $50-100M or whatever to lift "more than Webb" mass on a 5m rocket isn't really moving any needles.
The farther future is likely a multi-vehicle telescope (rather than just a bigger aperture), where a number of satellites hundreds or thousands of miles apart with tightly monitored geometry create a massive sized virtual aperture...and that kind of concept also isn't significantly enabled by SS.
