For decades I recall how space entrepreneurs and engineers
dreamed of developing a reliable, cost-effective booster that
can lower the cost of putting payloads into orbit at a rate
as low as 1000 dollars a pound.
Forget it!...It will never happen!...
Frankly I think that even 2,000 dollars per pound to earth-orbit
is also unobtainable now [for liquid-fueled rockets] due to a variety
of circumstances.

(1) The curse of inflation. Items such as fuel, processed metal and precision machined metal-parts, etc. are not getting cheaper with the passage of years... And wages for aerospace employees are not going down...It ain't going to happen!

(2) The word is insurance...Admittedly, I'm not an expert in insurance [I understand Raoul is]
but insurance companies do have risk analysis experts who help the companies determine
what coverage, if any, a satellite/payload owner could receive, and how much the owner would pay
to receive such coverage...One launch failure can [pardon the pun] skyrocket the premiums
the satellite/payload owners would have to pay to ensure coverage for future launch attempts
of a replacement payload. More likely no coverage would be obtainable.

(3) The curse of human and mechanical error...Rocket boosters and their launch teams are never going to be 100 percent reliable; and a lost booster and payload means that a replacement rocket-booster built by a hypothetical company offering a hypothetical 2000 dollar per pound to orbit
'freight-rate' would probably lose out on any 'profit' it intended to make on the deal to
launch that satellite...Yes, that dirty word to some: "profit". But it's the profits that the rocket-booster
manufacturer and launching company are after.

(4) The owner of the payload lost due to launch failure also has to figure in. If the owner cannot afford to build a replacement payload at [hypothetically] a cost of say 500,000 dollars, having
already spent 500,000 dollars on the original, not to mention also having spent 2 million dollars on trying to have the 1000 pound payload parked in orbit, unsuccessfully, the rocket-launching company will lose
that owner's business.

(5) Even launch scrubs and launch date postponements cost money...lost of money.

So the solution is?....Forget capitalism, try socialism for the rocket-launching industry. I could almost
feel the heat from some of your necks... Getting hot under your collars?

Or....Try an engineering end-run and do away with liquid-fueled rockets by finding a method
of [say] compressing propellant "gases" to pressures of 10,000 PSI or more, where gases like
oxygen will have densities close to that of LOX, and pressurized methane and hydrogen will
approach the densities of their cyrogenic cousins.
That willwork, as long as you could make the propellant tanks both incredibly strong and
astonishingly light....It's doable thanks to the polymer industry....Kevlar and carbon-fiber epoxy
materials have astonishingly high tensile strengths and incredible lightness.

Or....or....or...there is another approach!....Develop revolutionary propulsion systems that are
austere in their engineering and rely on the earth's atmosphere for a large part of the propulsion
propellant upto LEO.

Cheers.

Jake