Over in the comments section of this post by Dan over at Happy Fun Pundit, Porphyrogenitus writes:

I do think that there will be a viable private space industry eventually. But the costs will have to go down first.

This is one of the many bits of conventional wisdom about space that is wrong, and continues to hold us back. It confuses cause and effect, and betrays a misunderstanding of why the cost of launch is high.

For many fundamental, institutional reasons, costs will never go down as long as the government is in charge. Low cost will only result from the entry of private enterprise.

This kind of thinking assumes that launch costs are high because we don’t have the right “technology.” This is a mistaken belief. They’re high because the market is too small, and there’s no competition. There’s only one solution for that, and it’s not development of another launch system by NASA.