I recently ran across a post on Deep Sea News comparing the costs of biological research in different locations:

If you want to run a experiment in the intertidal it usually requires $100 of pvc and $100 of a graduate students time (about three weeks). In the deep sea that same experiment will run you that $200 plus another $400,000 for ship and rov/submersible time.

This raises an interesting question. What are the most expensive resources in your work today? and what would happen to your science if that cost dropped by 90% or 99%? One recent historical example that comes to mind is computing. Processor cycles used to be really expensive; now they're trivially cheap. Labor is another thing that has gotten cheaper: tasks that used to take a lot of time-- many kinds of routine lab work, for example-- can be done very quickly and more easily.

What would happen to space research if, for example, the costs of putting an experiment in space dropped to a penny or two per payload kilo? What would happen to deep sea research if it cost $100 to put something on the bottom of the ocean, rather than $400,000?