Business as usual there,

SpaceX scores $81.6 million Space Force contract to launch weather satellite

  The contract for the mission designated USSF-178 was awarded on June 27  ( 2025 ) by the Space Systems Command and represents SpaceX’s third consecutive win under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program.

  The mission will carry the Weather System Follow-on – Microwave Space Vehicle 2 (WSF-M2), along with a secondary payload of experimental small satellites called BLAZE-2. 

~ https://spacenews.com/spacex-scores-81-6-million-space-force...

New weather sats going up, just not "free data for taxpayers".

This sounds so cheap that we could have thousands of individuals launch their private constellations.

Do you really need to subsidise this anymore?

If anything brining competition to this space (pun intended) might improve the data quality.

A contract to lift a sat to orbit improves data quality as much as a transport contract to deliver furniture improves a chaise lounge.

Satellites are still tricky and time consuming to build and are an entire other ball of wax than a lift to orbit.

Of course I'm not arguing sats are easy or simple or whatever, but overall cost has and still is dominated by launch cost, by at least an order of magnitude.

  A typical weather satellite carries a price tag of $290 million; a spy satellite might cost an additional $100 million

~ https://science.howstuffworks.com/satellite10.htm

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) asked the aerospace and defense giant to build it at least three, and potentially as many as seven, new next-generation Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO) sats. If all options are exercised, the total contract value will reach $2.3 billion.

  Bad news for Lockheed Martin: That works out to $324.3 million per satellite.

~ https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/06/30/lockheed-martin-wi...

It's generally agreed that ~ $90 million for a sat launch is less than a third of a ~$300 million per sat build cost.

And have you got a source thats not a nearly 2 decades old and not for government contract?

Edit: here's one thats $30M https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/05/electron-tropics-lau...

> have you got a source thats not a nearly 2 decades old

Such as the Lockheed Martin 2024 contract I linked?

Sure.. try that link, it's from last year and talks about grown up big boy weather sat costs in 2024..

Your $30m SmallSat is not in the same league as a full featured $300m sat .. I'll leave you to work out the differences.

Moreover the launch costs for those $30m sats is under $8m each launch, again refuting an upstream claim about launch costs being higher than sat build costs.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron

   The starting price for delivering payloads to orbit is about US$7.5 million per launch, or US$25,000 per kg, which offers the only dedicated service at this price point.

I had a bit of a chat with chatgpt and I agree the smallsats are not replacement just yet, but in future there's no doubt they are better in most ways - faster iteration, far better resolution and of course lower cost.