"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?"

A lot people don't understand the significance of economics of scale, and even fewer understand how to get to a situation of having the advantage of economic of scale. Take the internet; how did we get to where we are now? Some will say it had to do with govt programs of things like laying fiber optic cable. But I would say it had *largely* to do with govt choosing not to interfere: the hippies probably had biggest effect upon the internet- at least they were good for something:).

One problem [and it's a good one to focus on because it could solved with little or no money] is access to a launch pad. This type of problem is solved to some extent by "suborbital route" because they can use a runway instead of conventional rocket launch pads- and there is generally greater potential access to a runways than a launch pad. As one example, in the news a few months ago was the development of a "spaceport" for suborbital vehicles to land and takeoff from the middle east- from UAE , I think. Of course there is lots potential political problems with this in particular, but point is in general this is the kind of thing that is maybe allowable [not prohibted by active or passive govt related opposition- including years to decades of red tape].
There is to my knowledge only one launch pad in the world which is privately owned {Sea Launch}. There is no launch pad in the world which can be rented, leased, or charged a fixed fee for a standardized usage. Btw, Sea Launch could do well, simply because it is the only private launch pad in the world, but they are unlikely to fully capitalize on this aspect [because they suffer from bureaucracy as much as most govts do- in fact you could say in a sense, the French companies are again ahead of America companies because they are getting Russian launcher to use their launch site.]