Basically, my guess is that there are two components to a satellite's construction costs:
1) Enough to get the job done
2) Insurance against launch costs in the form of additional reliability for components etc.
You can probably scale 2 pretty easily, but not 1. And concrete launch costs also don't take into consideration the cost of not having your sat working for 2 years before you can build and launch a replacement, so even if launches get dirt cheap you're going to build in additional reliability.
1) Enough to get the job done
2) Insurance against launch costs in the form of additional reliability for components etc.
You can probably scale 2 pretty easily, but not 1. And concrete launch costs also don't take into consideration the cost of not having your sat working for 2 years before you can build and launch a replacement, so even if launches get dirt cheap you're going to build in additional reliability.
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