I am an engineer just trying to understand design space tradeoffs
You're answer appears to be that launch cost would not reduced significantly with economies of scale, making any large mass launching unrealistic for virutally any purpose. Have I misinterpreted? For those of us that dream of building such things as space habitats, it would be interesting to understand what are cost limitations. I've read some papers on this but it has been a while. I was curious if there had been any new thinking that might significantly alter costs of putting large masses to orbit.
Right now it seems like it is either a century of bootstrapping or a breakthrough with something like a space elevator.