What I heard last night that was new to me (maybe he’s said this before) was that it was less than a million per flight on the margin, and it could deliver 150 tons to LEO (I had thought the number was a hundred tons). That’s a fifty percent increase, and a one-third reduction in cost per pound.
I’m glad that Webb is working, but I continue to believe it was a mistake.
[Update a while later]
To clarify, I think it was a mistake to do it in the way it was done, but now that it’s operational, obviously it would be a mistake to abandon it now.
Note that this seemed to be an accident of inadvertent file naming, but FM subcarriers carry all sorts of info (like real-time traffic, weather, or alerts). Imagine the kinds of malicious things one could do with this, because the automakers haven’t bullet proofed their code. Particularly with self-driving cars and kill switches. There should be a firewall between a car’s radio and the rest of the avionics (as I think they do for aircraft entertainment systems).