SpaceX has hints of monopoly, has shown consistent innovation, and has an ambitious long term vision. Boeing lacks all of the above, so it's apples and oranges
Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same.
Access to space is a national security thing so all big countries will fund their own alternatives.
Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
> Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same
China and Blue Origin are Europe may be funding the research, but Arianespace ensures it's more than a decade away from matching today's Falcon Heavy.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
The thing is that you can't put a price tag on national security. For example Ukraine got F16s. Good plane. However after a spat between Zelensky a Trump, Ukrainian F16 got no new updates to their jammers, which temporarily degraded the plane performance and Ukrainians needed to pull them out of frontlines.
Sometimes it is just better to fly on a plane which is not the top performer, but which you can control and manufacture or which a neighbor with same geopolitical problems like you can control and manufacture - i.e. Swedish SAAB JAS39
Same with space launches. Furthermore SpaceX is US company, so US government will want to know everything about the payload, probably down to the schematics and software, which is a big no-no for national security, but even for IP protection - what is stopping US government to supplying your IP to your US competitor? Nothing.
Of course you can. It costs more, but a finite amount more.
Your argument is it'sz worth paying that cost. I agree. But those cases are limited, both by the customer base and that additional cost.
SpaceX is not launching non-U.S. national security payloads. That's not great for American power. But it's a rounding error for a launch provider putting mass in orbit over three times a week [1].
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies
I wouldn’t make business or investment decisions based on any assumptions about “alienation.” I was just in Tokyo for a week of meetings with various business professionals, and there was zero sign of any “alienation.” I was expecting to spend most of the time talking about tariffs and nobody even about them. Everyone instead was focused on the new Prime Minister’s faux pas commenting on the security of Taiwan.
Just one set of data points, of course, but consider whether this concept of alienation is real or a creation of US media.
I dunno, I've noticed quite a bit of hesitancy. Like they want to figure out "which kind" of American you are before they will even nudge the topic of US politics.
Reusable rockets aren't magic. There is a long distance between 'reusable' and reusing something many 100s of times to reach scale.
Blue Origin is losing billions every year, its not hobby of the richest person in the world, not true competitor. Remember rockets are small markets and everybody other then SpaceX is losing money.
Europe and China has literally 0 shot at breaking into the places SpaceX dominates. Europe will take another 10 years before they get a reusable rocket and even then, launching something like Starship wouldn't happen for another long time after that.
China simply can't compete in these markets by law, in the US. Them having reusable rockets doesn't matter for SpaceX. I don't think China will have Starlink competitor that can compete globally anytime soon. But that might be a real competitor eventually.
Kupiter is arguable a more real competitor.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years.
That's a gigantic, gigantic, huge and absurdly large assumption.
A lot would need to happen for all current US allies to block all SpaceX products.
Not to suggest that 61x multiple is justified, but your counter argument doesn't really work.
I think the better argument against the 61x multiple is that the overall market simply isn't big enough. SpaceX would have to break into many other markets and how to do that is difficult to say for a number of reasons.
I have criticized Musk plenty and have been skeptical of the Starship timelines from the beginning, however, SpaceX has launched over 150 times this year. That's more than the entire rest of the world. Surely they must be doing something right?
The launching is routine, the landing and being able to turn around the same booster again in a few weeks is a capability no one else has. Their ability to launch so often came in handy over the past few years when other providers faltered. They were able to, on short notice, take over launches from Ariane 6, Vulcan, and Antares because of development delays and Soyuz because of political problems. No other medium launch provider can fit a launch in on short notice, they need years of lead time for one, let alone multiple. For SpaceX they just bump a Starlink payload a few months from now and replace it with the new one.
> all for their not as good as fiber internet
Starlink is making money. Its not just stealing market share from the incumbents but its significantly expanded the market.
It's not making money though, it's being propped up by fascist governments and VC's. It's laggy, more expensive internet that goes out w/ every solar flare, nobody I know even would think about using it for daily use and don't even lie to me and say you have a "friend" who loves it or that same old bs.
> skeptical of the Starship timelines from the beginning
I would hope so, the Shotwell 2018 TED Talk put point to point flights for Starship for around the price of business class in commercial service by 2028, Musk said still on track a few years later after the move away from aspirated cooling, a bit later I think they made the move to aspirational timelines.
It made an impression on me when Musk invited the world's press to Texas and stood them in front of MK1, pointed at it and said it would go to space that year. It also made an impression when it and the next few fell apart on the ground.
After that I decided I wasn't going to count Musk's eggs before they are hatched. What has been accomplished with Starship so far is impressive, that should be acknowledged. But big todo items, heat shield, refueling and reusability are still to be proved and we'll have to wait and see if and when they are achieved.
> The only thing they are consistent on is blowing up taxpayer bought rockets.
Weird. I must have been imagining the Falcon 9 launching more mass to orbit this year than the entirety of the rest of the planet. More than all the flights of the Space Shuttle program combined.
Starliner leaving astronauts stranded after first not making it to the space station.
737 MAX crashing and killing people due to slapped-together flight control integration.
737 MAX having windows blow out due to sheer manufacturing incompetence.
KC-46 deliveries being rejected due to literal tools being found in fuel tanks.
Boeing HAD an over 100 year history of delivering. You can build a thousand bridges. No one's calling you a bridgebuilder after you shag just one sheep.
My experience was less good. Starlink suffered from intermittent outages, and enough bitrate jitter to make video calling a distraction. Latency was good but still higher than advertised, and the average download speed felt noticeably slower than wired broadband. It wasn't uncommon to see 50% dropped packets while playing a game or watching live content, which is more than I saw with Hughesnet.
It's preferable to 3G or being stranded in the woods, but there are definitely points where I wondered if a 4G LTE hotspot would have been faster for home internet.
I mean anecdotes aren't great for sweeping generalizations. When I'm taking vacation at my sister's ranch teams calls work just fine with my customers, so ones mileage may vary.
Is satellite internet advertised as being more capable than a 4G LTE hotspot?
From my understanding, physics would not allow that (for a decent, not oversubscribed 4G LTE mobile connection and backhaul). But those parameters exist for satellite internet, too.
Ah yes. One of them got $2.6B for six flights. The other one got $4.2B for six flights.
One of them flew six flights successfully, got contract extended further to 14 flights for a total of 4.93 billion. They also flew other paying customers seven times.
In that time, the second one flew once with astronauts, and had so many problems that they ended up coming home on the first guy's spacecraft.
It's about growth potential. Boeing has all the excitement of a utility company, just with bigger publicity problems. SpaceX has the potential to forge whole new industries. If you're bullish on space tourism or asteroid mining, SpaceX is the best bet on the table right now.
> China's building two, so that advantage will be fleeting
Monopoly may be fleeting. Advantage, no.
Again, we're looking at a decade plus of SpaceX having a decided advantage in putting mass in orbit. That could mean more capability, more capacity, faster deployment of new technology or even more margin (since you can go cheap on station keeping).
> 800b valuation on 13b of revenue in 2024. That's a 61x multiple
From about $9bn in 2023. 40%+ growth yields a PRG ratio (modified PEG [1]) of about 1.5x.
Boeing managed to increase its revenue in 2025 about 10%, putting its similar ratio at around 0.2x. SpaceX trading around 7x where Boeing trades doesn't strike me, at first glance, as unreasonable.
I think Boeing is up largely for other reasons like entire defense sector going up, especially aerospace, after US aerial participation in the twelve-day Iran war.
The issue is that its not clear what other markets SpaceX can grow into. The rocket market is small. The government market for sats and the commercial market for sats is bigger but SpaceX already domiantes that.
Its not clear to me how much room there is for that kind of growth to continue.
They are the overwhelmingly dominate space company, but how much actual revenue growth can you get from that. Telecommunications is already the largest part of the sector, and SpaceX already the overwhelmingly dominate player.
At some point you need to break into something other then that to be able to continue to grow.
Or maybe my assumption about that is wrong, and combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative.
> its not clear what other markets SpaceX can grow into. The rocket market is small
Ten years ago, smart people said the launch market couldn't possibly grow beyond $3 to 5bn.
There is a tonnne of induced demand when it comes to launch. In LEO alone we have telecommunications, sensing and defence applications, most of which don't do well when put on the same bird. Add to that potential power-transmission uses and a global race to the Moon and Mars and it seems even if Starship can be mass manufactured, production will be the limiter, not demand.
> combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative
Doubtful for broadband. Probable for rural and maybe even suburban cellular.
Ten years ago i already knew that SpaceX was able to build spacecraft, see Dragon. And I already new telecommunications was a big field. That SpaceX would try to expand in sat manufacture was clear and their advantage obvious.
Telecommunications is overwhelmingly the largest space sector, it was in the 90s and is today. Sensing has been around for 60+ years and has grown fast both military and civilian, Planet and co. But its small compared to Telecommunication. And in order to rival that you would need many, many more years of incredibly fast growth.
As for defense application, the most absurd possible one would be Golden Dome. And granted that would be a big chucnk of money if SpaceX can get a huge piece. But I don't think Goldon Dome will happen anytime soon or will be quite a big difference.
You are right that cellular will grow and that's a vector for continued growth of Starlink. So there is decently growth and a lot yet to do. SpaceX a growth company, but justifying 800b on that is a bit questionable. They would need to like 5x in revenue and continue to show massive growth.
As for general 'induced demand', maybe, but we have already seen some of that, and there is growth, but nowhere near the amount of growth for SpaceX to go from 100s to 1000s of launches. Specially with Starship.
There needs to be 3-5 other telecom sized sectors that are actually real. Defense MIGHT be 1.
I just don't see it. Tourism, space mining and space manufacturing would need to happen big time.
There is a lot of talk about 'data centers in space' but I think that is silly. Space solar is even worse.
This has since then been confirmed to not be true:
There has been a lot of press claiming @SpaceX is raising money at $800B, which is not accurate.
SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors.
Valuation increments are a function of progress with Starship and Starlink and securing global direct-to-cell spectrum that greatly increases our addressable market.
And one other thing that is arguably most significant by far.
While I have great fondness for @NASA, they will constitute less than 5% of our revenue next year. Commercial Starlink is by far our largest contributor to revenue.
Some people have claimed that SpaceX gets “subsidized” by NASA. This is absolutely false.
The SpaceX team won the NASA contracts because we offered the best product at the lowest price. BOTH best product AND lowest cost. With regard to astronaut transport, SpaceX is currently the only option that passes NASA safety standards.
Would think that blue origin and project kuiper launching for amazon that would put downward pressure on SpaceX, as they are about to have a huge amount of competition for starlink, as Amazon has massive distribution advantages - wouldn't be surprised introductory bundling with Prime etc...
Your joking right? IRIS2 is mostly for government and has nowhere near the capacity or ground infrastructure necessary. Lets alone the advanced laser links to compete for shipping and planes. Let alone the manufacturing of ground terminals.
Iris2 might will support 5G-NTN. But that doesn't many any phone can use it no problem. Even if you use 5G-NTN you want some dedicated terminals, and there are prototypes for that. The exact details for Iris2 is not yet known publicly and there are many vendors trying to get in on it. The specification basically says support 5G-NTN (3GPP) “to the maximum extent possible”. And maybe future handsets will support it better.
But we are decently far from a situation where Iris2 has a dedicated consumer arm that spits out millions of consumer grade standard terminals that people can set up within minutes.
We are still very early, with contracts just signed and many questions still open. And ESA not exactly having a track record of great execution.
Lets remember this system even if you are insane optimistic will not exist fully before 2031. Likely years after that if you take into account all the ongoing issues. And even when it finally arrives, the capacity isn't really designed for mass users against Starlink anyway.
What are you joking? Amazon is super far behind and unlikely to be able to launch its satellites in time to meet its FCC licensing requirements. They won't even be only for 24+ months. Meanwhile Starlink is growing very quickly.
Amazon is not a competitor until they actually have a viable product which they may never achieve.
Starlink is not going to be a monopoly. The other big countries won’t allow it.
Like Tesla, SpaceX was ahead of the game by making big bets on new technology. Over time, that lead erodes when other players start competing. Tesla is now a declining player in EVs rapidly falling behind market leaders in AV and battery tech. I suspect spaceX will have a similar trajectory
Tesla never had unique technology, except maybe the 'software defined car' but that wasn't the big sellers on its own.
Tesla integrated other peoples cells into a nice system, but they were never uniquely good at that. They were successful because they invested a huge amount into scaling battery manufacture faster then anybody in the beginning. Something that everybody could replicate.
SpaceX on the other hand has a true technical advantage. But its also a much smaller market.
China will match Starlink in ~5 years and will push adoption hard through it's Belt and Road initiative, just as it has with it's (admittedly superior) GPS system. Starlink may become the de facto option in the Western world, but it won't have a chance at a global monopoly.
I wonder if this has more to do with XAi than SpaceX. He recently had SpaceX invest $2B into XAi due to the AI arms race. If SpaceX had unneeded cash sitting around why raise money now?
"SpaceX is kicking off a secondary share sale." It isn't raising money, it's letting insiders sell. In the past, SpaceX has been a net buyer of its shares in such tenders.
Given Musk's pay package that requires getting Tesla's valuation to $8 trillion, isn't it obvious that he should absorb all of his holdings (SpaceX, X, xAI) into Tesla?
That pay package was a reaction to the large problems he is having competing with ESG forces for control of the company. Keeping SpaceX private is another. He described it as trying to keep the robot army he is building out of enemy hands.
Probably a good idea to do it now, because Trump has made sure SpaceX is about to have yet another European, a Chinese and an Indian competitor soon. 2 out of 3 have already demonstrated landing a rocket, as has Blue origin in the US with the New Glenn launch + landing. Plus a few countries are thinking about it, at least Switzerland, South Korea and Israel if you can believe it.
Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor (by approving the feature on "old" satellites), and China is already doing launches and theirs should be at least partially operational. Russia claims to have a working Starlink competitor and India is building one.
Oh and as for profitability ... not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium, but that was far from the only attempt+bankruptcy building Space internet. Well, the economics are discussed in this video:
TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com "We lose on every sale but make it up on volume" style move. So yes, high time to sell the stock indeed.
Oh, and Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars and will be the first private company getting a payload to Mars soon (the "ESCAPADE" mission). As in payload is on the way and there's no way SpaceX can catch up anymore. In fact it's pretty tough finding another rocket manufacturer that has not launched a mission to Mars. Boeing has launched payloads to Mars. Blue origin has. Arianespace has. Russia has. Not especially economically relevant* but worth mentioning. Economics are not what determines either rocket building or launches and hasn't ever done so. Which means rocket launches are cheaper than they can be in private hands.
* what is economically relevant though is that SpaceX is not even saving the US government money. The US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program. Everyone always makes the point that SpaceX is cheaper than SLS. However ... this fails to correctly compare prices for the only options the US government has:
Option 1: pay for SLS
Option 2: pay for SLS and SpaceX.
So really the price of SpaceX rocket launches doesn't even matter, not using SpaceX will be the cheapest option because math.
Strange. For me profitable means money_out > money_in, over the whole company history. OpenAI stock is worth 137 billion. Of this, at least 20B was actual money put in (some "free" by the US government). So let's say $18B investment, although that should really be increased by whatever investments were made in Starlink, which is also >$10 billion.
Revenue for SpaceX, with starlink split out (because starlink pays in equity). Obviously, these are guesses.
2024: $14 billion revenue, of which $10b is Starlink investment
2025: $15 billion revenue, of which $11b is Starlink investment
Starlink, when some figures were publicly discussed, in 2023, had $55 million profit on $1.5 billion revenue (but that was counting Starlink shares as cash), about 3.7%
Let's very generously say they doubled that in the past 2 years, and hey, we're being generous, round up. Say they're at 10% margin (Musk's claim, of course, is 60%).
So:
2024: $140 million profit, of which $10b was invested in Starlink
2025: $150 million profit, of which $11b was invested in Starlink
Cashflow:
2024: $-10 billion
2025: $-11 billion
So I think I can be very comfortable in saying that SpaceX is not profitable, it's deep in the red, getting worse over time, only supported by Starlink valuation. With somewhat less confidence I can say it's actually getting less profitable over time, rather than more.
They would need to at least 5x the launches they did in 2024 to just breakeven (while potentially reducing starlink launches to zero, which would make it close to 15x), and they only increased the launches by 20% (138 in 2024 vs 129 launches in 2025 up to october). 20% is generous. There is the question of how much of these launches were Starlink, and for 2025 there is no good data, but up to 2025 Starlink launches increased by over 40%.
My assessment is unless Starlink takes over global internet, SpaceX is bankrupt and will have to sell it's designs and launch technology for pennies on the dollar.
Oh and can I just add, I've interviewed at Starlink and received a (pathetic) offer, which people on reddit claim was pretty typical. Which told me one thing: Starlink is already very aware of the need to drastically save money.
> For me profitable means money_out > money_in, over the whole company history
One, this is a nonsense definition. Two, SpaceX meets it. It’s why it hasn’t fundraised for years.
> I've interviewed at Starlink and received a (pathetic) offer, which people on reddit claim was pretty typical. Which told me one thing: Starlink is already very aware of the need to drastically save money
Wat. Based on this metric, Amazon and Walmart are broke.
Ridiculous. SpaceX offers a product that costs far less than its competitors while being as good or better in most respects. Their profit margins on launches must be enormous at this point.
That in turn enables Starlink. They can put up thousands of satellites very cheaply. Then they can turn around and sell subscriptions. Starlink has about 8 million active customers. At $40+/month, that's at least $4 billion/year in revenue. Probably a lot more. Given their launch costs, that's a ton of profit.
"not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before" is just... not true. Nothing like it was ever tried before. Iridium is the only one that came even vaguely close, and it was still a radically different type of service. Iridium was extremely low capacity phone service, then low-bandwidth (it made dialup look super fast by comparison) data, with a network of a few dozen satellites covering the globe. It could not support many customers because it had few satellites. It also had to pay for launches in the 1990s, so an order of magnitude or more costlier. That means that it was enormously expensive, for a product few people actually needed. Handsets cost thousands of dollars, then you got to pay several dollars per minute on top of that.
Iridium was basically space dialup, and extremely expensive space dialup at that. Starlink is space broadband, and their cheap launch costs and other technological advancements mean the service is profitable at a competitive price point.
Option 1 isn’t really an option, unfortunately. There are no viable single launch options using it. So it’s really SLS x 2. But building and launching one SLS at a time is almost too much as it is. If that’s the only option, I think Artemis is dead and we should start over.
What about that Tesla that regularly crosses Mars orbit? Ok, it's not on Mars, but it was just about calculating an orbit. They could have smashed it on Mars as well.
Injecting a dummy payload into an eccentric helicentric orbit which periodically crosses' Mars' orbit /= a Mars mission. The complexity and relevance to future human presence on Mars isn't close
(Though tbf the choice of launch vehicle isn't that relevant to whether the ESCAPADE mission succeeds, and missions involving Mars flybys like Hera which are lot more serious than the Tesla one have been launched on SpaceX rockets)
If injecting a payload into an eccentric heliocentric orbit doesn't count, then why does injecting a payload into MEO count, just because that payload is then capable of getting to Mars from there? BO didn't launch it to Mars, they launched it to orbit, and ESCAPADE is now getting itself to Mars.
Nice, the wording of "smashed it". Because, the point of getting to Mars or Mars orbit is that you need rocket burns to insert and to land on Mars. Getting to places in space is a delta-V game and paying only half your delta-V costs doesn't count because it doesn't work.
If that's why it matters, then why are you crediting BO for that when they didn't have anything to do with the parts which will be performing those burns?
Yep, he is desperate for cash, he is leveraged to the hilt on his shares which is why he desperately begs his fanboys for more. His empire is a house of cards.
Blue Origin is losing many billions every year and has only survived thanks to a hobby project. And even if they continue, to get to SpaceX like cadence is a long way away, and many more billions in investment.
Europe is a decade plus behind and has no way ever to get to the launch cadence. And even then they have 0 chance competing for international launch. And a true Starlink competitor out of Europe is fantasy.
> Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor
No it doesn't.
> .. not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium
If you really think Starlink and Iridium are comparable, you should get your head checked.
And just because something hasn't worked before, doesn't mean changing technology doesn't change that.
The question you should ask is "Are there historical example where a 10x drop in cost allowed for a new much larger volume in an industry". And if you look at it that way, its patently obvious.
SpaceX doesn't even need to pay itself margin, if SpaceX had to fully buy SpaceX launches, the economics would be a lot worse.
> TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com
This is analysis where my only conclusion is that you just hate Musk and SpaceX for political reasons.
Did pets.com make like 10 billion in revenue and had many major militaries as costumers? I must have missed that.
> so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program.
It does have a choice the US doesn't need to publicly fund anything. They already have ULA, SpaceX, BlueOrigin, Rocket Lab, Stoke space, Relativity.
> Everyone always makes the point that SpaceX is cheaper than SLS. However ... this fails to correctly compare prices for the only options the US government has:
You act as if SLS is the law of the universe, but it isn't. Anybody with a brain has known for 10+ years that eventually the US will switch to commercial rocket launch. As NASA has already mostly done, and DoD has done 100% already.
SLS is the last vestige of a dying system of cronies from the Shuttle days. It has not future. Only a long political fight to suck up as many resources at can be extract from congress before it inevitably dies.
The future in the US is clear, competitive launch with SpaceX as the leading provider and ULA, Blue and friends competing for contracts.
Every time someone mentions Eutelsat as a competitor I'm reminded that my own friend group has multiple people who can simply buy the entire company, which sort of describes how successful it is.
Option 1 isn't an option, really. NSSL policy is to ensure that there are two independent providers so that Assured Access To Space can work.
If SpaceX doesn't get Starship operational soon, they're going to lose their advantage to Blue Origin and probably at least one of the several Chinese rocket companies.
Even without Starship Falcon Heavy is still competitive with New Glenn, and nobody is anywhere close to competing with Starlink (Amazon is still far behind, as is ASTS). And if Starship works SpaceX will still be in the lead for a long, long time.
IMO the only remaining unanswered question for the Starship program is the reusability of the heat shield. There's no reason to believe any other part of it can't work.
I always had the impression that the propellant transfer was the harder question than the heat shield. They have done a transfer demo from one internal tank to another, but they still need to test from one ship to another ship.
I only casually follow the news from r/spacex, but prop transfer is what I see generate the most discussion. It’s a hard requirement for all deep space missions. Where the heat shield could be refurbished between launches.
The heat shield may be a "we don't know how to do the physics" problem, where propellant transfer is a "complex integration of well understood components" problem. If the heat shield requires per launch refurbishment it cripples the colonization dream.
Deep space missions yes. But Starlink isn't deep space - and neither is the vast majority of commercial payloads.
Propellant transfer is relevant because it's vital for sending entire Starships to Moon and Mars - which are the exciting Starship missions. This includes Artemis. But commercially? Artemis contract isn't even a large part of SpaceX's revenue.
Propellant transfer, with cryogenic propellants, can be done using cryocoolers. It's not too hard of a problem. Besides, Starship only needs prop transfer for Moon and Mars missions, but the later are fantasy and the former probably isn't going to happen either, and actually just regular LEO launches with a fully reusable rocket is where most of the money is anyway.
The heat shield is a huge problem though. Without the heat shield, there's simply no way SpaceX can use Starship to make money.
Heat shield reuse is a big deal for orbital refueling too, because it requires 12+ launches in a short time frame. If you don't have heat shield reuse then you need 12+ Starships and 12+ refurbishments per mission.
Why do you think transfer of propellant is so difficult? We do propellant transfer all the time in space. The only real different is that the liquid is colder and Starship is just plane bigger.
But we pipe around cold stuff in space internal to space ships already quite often.
What is the fundamental limitation that you worried about?
I would say the head-shield is far harder an an unsolved problem, specially with re-use. Refurbish is not economically viable, specially not after 1 launch. That would be against every design goal of Starship. It has never been demonstrated in a practical fashion.
I really want SpaceX to succeed, but the Starship heat shield situation seems quite fucked. I heard they're even reconsidering active cooling now. Maybe they'll figure something out but I don't consider that a foregone conclusion.
> IMO the only remaining unanswered question for the Starship program is the reusability of the heat shield. There's no reason to believe any other part of it can't work.
Is that different from, say, a year ago? The Starship concept seems technically sound, and the doubt is about whether SpaceX can actually get there, given the rather slow (visible) pace of progress.
China is currently building TWO competing starlink-type systems. Given the trajectory of China in recent years, I no longer say "nobody is anywhere close to competing with..." about pretty much anything.
China's constellations are roughly where Starlink was in early 2020, except that their launch costs remain much higher. Yes, they move fast, but SpaceX is one of the few US companies I'd bet on to compete with them.
Also, I wonder how receptive the world will be to Chinese ISPs given their history of internet censorship at home.
SpaceX is ultimately still an American company operating at American scale vs PRC. Last year spaceX had fleet of 18 F9s doing more than 50% of global launches, 80% including starlink. SpaceX stans fixate over 50% and 80%, but ignore that 18 rocket cores is rookie numbers. 7/145 US space launches in 2024 was Non SpaceX. That means US in aggregate build ~25 rockets (i think less since some SpaceX are older cores). Versus PRC 68, about ~80 tyhis year (missing keep missing goal of 100). So we can already see there's a 4-5x difference in total launch vehicles production. When/if PRC sorts out reusables, they get both cadence x volume, and no telling how far they can extend the gap, if anything like auto, fast enough that they can overtake SpaceX in historic payload within a few years. Assuming payload enough demand, which I doubt... outside space weaponization arms race.
I think the world, well mainly govs, many of whom who are already running Huawei network gear would appreciate PRC willingness to accomodate local filtering (censorship) rules with how world is trending towards cyber soveignty.
That said, I can see SpaceX being elevated to Boeing tier strategic asset to compete, assuming Musk badblood doesn't interfere.
SpaceX is absolutely capable of building 80 rockets, if they needed to. Don't forget that they built 132 F9 second stages last year, plus thousands of satellites and millions of user terminals. But they don't need to build 80 first stages because their first stages are getting reused 30 times. Why would they waste time building first stages they don't need? China needs to build 80 full rockets because theirs explode after each use.
Meanwhile the Starship factory is looking like it will be quite productive once the design is locked down.
Upperstage stage 1/6 weight with simple merlin engine. SpaceX might need to build 80 first stages if PRC reusable ends up building 80 first stages that's also reusable 30 times. Whether SpaceX can actually build and operate 80 first stages (very likely), and their associated second stages (more questionable) or realistically 100, or 200, we don't actually know, but we know basically in any mature industry PRC can outscale US capabilities, sometimes dramatically, i.e. 200-300x in shipbuilding.
The point is once PRC figures out reusables and operates a 100/200/300 fleet of reusables, is SpaceX which is more or less entire American space industrial base able to match. Or it it going to go the way of EV or any other PRC high capacity industry where US can't.
Perhaps. But history suggests that "soon" will still be 6+ years. Scaling up from the first few successful launches of a(n orbital) rocket, to high-frequency / high-reliability / low cost launches of that rocket, appears to be extremely difficult.
800b valuation on 13b of revenue in 2024. That's a 61x multiple.
Boeing for comparison has a 2x multiple (65b rev with a 154b valuation).
SpaceX has hints of monopoly, has shown consistent innovation, and has an ambitious long term vision. Boeing lacks all of the above, so it's apples and oranges
I don’t know about that.
Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same.
Access to space is a national security thing so all big countries will fund their own alternatives.
Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
> Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same
China and Blue Origin are Europe may be funding the research, but Arianespace ensures it's more than a decade away from matching today's Falcon Heavy.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
Because it's cheaper and more frequent.
> Because it's cheaper and more frequent.
The thing is that you can't put a price tag on national security. For example Ukraine got F16s. Good plane. However after a spat between Zelensky a Trump, Ukrainian F16 got no new updates to their jammers, which temporarily degraded the plane performance and Ukrainians needed to pull them out of frontlines.
Sometimes it is just better to fly on a plane which is not the top performer, but which you can control and manufacture or which a neighbor with same geopolitical problems like you can control and manufacture - i.e. Swedish SAAB JAS39
Same with space launches. Furthermore SpaceX is US company, so US government will want to know everything about the payload, probably down to the schematics and software, which is a big no-no for national security, but even for IP protection - what is stopping US government to supplying your IP to your US competitor? Nothing.
> you can't put a price tag on national security
Of course you can. It costs more, but a finite amount more.
Your argument is it'sz worth paying that cost. I agree. But those cases are limited, both by the customer base and that additional cost.
SpaceX is not launching non-U.S. national security payloads. That's not great for American power. But it's a rounding error for a launch provider putting mass in orbit over three times a week [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
JAS 39 Gripen is using a US engine with export controls, so they could stop that too if they wanted to... https://en.defence-ua.com/news/gripen_still_relies_on_us_eng...
It can use Rolls Royce engine as well.
Ukraine has no money. Of course cost matters
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies
I wouldn’t make business or investment decisions based on any assumptions about “alienation.” I was just in Tokyo for a week of meetings with various business professionals, and there was zero sign of any “alienation.” I was expecting to spend most of the time talking about tariffs and nobody even about them. Everyone instead was focused on the new Prime Minister’s faux pas commenting on the security of Taiwan.
Just one set of data points, of course, but consider whether this concept of alienation is real or a creation of US media.
I dunno, I've noticed quite a bit of hesitancy. Like they want to figure out "which kind" of American you are before they will even nudge the topic of US politics.
just another sign that the world does not revolve around the us anymore.
Reusable rockets aren't magic. There is a long distance between 'reusable' and reusing something many 100s of times to reach scale.
Blue Origin is losing billions every year, its not hobby of the richest person in the world, not true competitor. Remember rockets are small markets and everybody other then SpaceX is losing money.
Europe and China has literally 0 shot at breaking into the places SpaceX dominates. Europe will take another 10 years before they get a reusable rocket and even then, launching something like Starship wouldn't happen for another long time after that.
China simply can't compete in these markets by law, in the US. Them having reusable rockets doesn't matter for SpaceX. I don't think China will have Starlink competitor that can compete globally anytime soon. But that might be a real competitor eventually.
Kupiter is arguable a more real competitor.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years.
That's a gigantic, gigantic, huge and absurdly large assumption.
A lot would need to happen for all current US allies to block all SpaceX products.
Not to suggest that 61x multiple is justified, but your counter argument doesn't really work.
I think the better argument against the 61x multiple is that the overall market simply isn't big enough. SpaceX would have to break into many other markets and how to do that is difficult to say for a number of reasons.
Fanboy detected. The only thing they are consistent on is blowing up taxpayer bought rockets.
I have criticized Musk plenty and have been skeptical of the Starship timelines from the beginning, however, SpaceX has launched over 150 times this year. That's more than the entire rest of the world. Surely they must be doing something right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_in_spaceflight
Those are routine satellite launches that we've been able to do for decades, all for their not as good as fiber internet.
> routine satellite launches
The launching is routine, the landing and being able to turn around the same booster again in a few weeks is a capability no one else has. Their ability to launch so often came in handy over the past few years when other providers faltered. They were able to, on short notice, take over launches from Ariane 6, Vulcan, and Antares because of development delays and Soyuz because of political problems. No other medium launch provider can fit a launch in on short notice, they need years of lead time for one, let alone multiple. For SpaceX they just bump a Starlink payload a few months from now and replace it with the new one.
> all for their not as good as fiber internet
Starlink is making money. Its not just stealing market share from the incumbents but its significantly expanded the market.
It's not making money though, it's being propped up by fascist governments and VC's. It's laggy, more expensive internet that goes out w/ every solar flare, nobody I know even would think about using it for daily use and don't even lie to me and say you have a "friend" who loves it or that same old bs.
> skeptical of the Starship timelines from the beginning
I would hope so, the Shotwell 2018 TED Talk put point to point flights for Starship for around the price of business class in commercial service by 2028, Musk said still on track a few years later after the move away from aspirated cooling, a bit later I think they made the move to aspirational timelines.
It made an impression on me when Musk invited the world's press to Texas and stood them in front of MK1, pointed at it and said it would go to space that year. It also made an impression when it and the next few fell apart on the ground.
After that I decided I wasn't going to count Musk's eggs before they are hatched. What has been accomplished with Starship so far is impressive, that should be acknowledged. But big todo items, heat shield, refueling and reusability are still to be proved and we'll have to wait and see if and when they are achieved.
> The only thing they are consistent on is blowing up taxpayer bought rockets.
Weird. I must have been imagining the Falcon 9 launching more mass to orbit this year than the entirety of the rest of the planet. More than all the flights of the Space Shuttle program combined.
Whenever somebody uses the term 'fanboy' you know that they are a just a 'hater'.
Whenever somebody uses the term 'hater', you know they are just an 'investor' in overvalued bubble stocks.
I don't use either term unless somebody else uses it first and I want to show them how silly they look making petty arguments on that level.
Boeing has an over 100 year history of consistently delivering products at all levels of its industry. SpaceX has .... good vibes?
Starliner leaving astronauts stranded after first not making it to the space station.
737 MAX crashing and killing people due to slapped-together flight control integration.
737 MAX having windows blow out due to sheer manufacturing incompetence.
KC-46 deliveries being rejected due to literal tools being found in fuel tanks.
Boeing HAD an over 100 year history of delivering. You can build a thousand bridges. No one's calling you a bridgebuilder after you shag just one sheep.
I'm using their services to chat with you right now. You are correct, it's all done with good electromagnetic vibrations.
My experience was less good. Starlink suffered from intermittent outages, and enough bitrate jitter to make video calling a distraction. Latency was good but still higher than advertised, and the average download speed felt noticeably slower than wired broadband. It wasn't uncommon to see 50% dropped packets while playing a game or watching live content, which is more than I saw with Hughesnet.
It's preferable to 3G or being stranded in the woods, but there are definitely points where I wondered if a 4G LTE hotspot would have been faster for home internet.
I mean anecdotes aren't great for sweeping generalizations. When I'm taking vacation at my sister's ranch teams calls work just fine with my customers, so ones mileage may vary.
Is satellite internet advertised as being more capable than a 4G LTE hotspot?
From my understanding, physics would not allow that (for a decent, not oversubscribed 4G LTE mobile connection and backhaul). But those parameters exist for satellite internet, too.
And recently went off a cliff. Have you heard about the 737 MAX, with not one but 2 crashes due to problems with it's control system?
Ah yes. One of them got $2.6B for six flights. The other one got $4.2B for six flights.
One of them flew six flights successfully, got contract extended further to 14 flights for a total of 4.93 billion. They also flew other paying customers seven times.
In that time, the second one flew once with astronauts, and had so many problems that they ended up coming home on the first guy's spacecraft.
I will let you figure out who is who.
Consistent delivery at all levels indeed.
Hey but someone is getting a sweet pay because unions.
Spending taxpayer money towards lazy union worker > good.
Spending less money towards hardworking non-union worker that actually delivers something > bad.
Funny world we live in.
> Boeing has an over 100 year history of consistently delivering products
Like Starliner?
> SpaceX has .... good vibes?
...if by "good vibes" you mean:
- 138 rocket launches last year
- Global low-latency internet
Both “global” and “low-latency” are glossing over significant caveats.
Can you give an example of a lower latency satellite service?
It's about growth potential. Boeing has all the excitement of a utility company, just with bigger publicity problems. SpaceX has the potential to forge whole new industries. If you're bullish on space tourism or asteroid mining, SpaceX is the best bet on the table right now.
> If you're bullish on space tourism or asteroid mining
You don't need either of these to justify the thesis. Just LEO constellations.
China's building two, so that advantage will be fleeting.
> China's building two, so that advantage will be fleeting
Monopoly may be fleeting. Advantage, no.
Again, we're looking at a decade plus of SpaceX having a decided advantage in putting mass in orbit. That could mean more capability, more capacity, faster deployment of new technology or even more margin (since you can go cheap on station keeping).
Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore beg to differ.
> 800b valuation on 13b of revenue in 2024. That's a 61x multiple
From about $9bn in 2023. 40%+ growth yields a PRG ratio (modified PEG [1]) of about 1.5x.
Boeing managed to increase its revenue in 2025 about 10%, putting its similar ratio at around 0.2x. SpaceX trading around 7x where Boeing trades doesn't strike me, at first glance, as unreasonable.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pegratio.asp
I think Boeing is up largely for other reasons like entire defense sector going up, especially aerospace, after US aerial participation in the twelve-day Iran war.
The issue is that its not clear what other markets SpaceX can grow into. The rocket market is small. The government market for sats and the commercial market for sats is bigger but SpaceX already domiantes that.
Its not clear to me how much room there is for that kind of growth to continue.
They are the overwhelmingly dominate space company, but how much actual revenue growth can you get from that. Telecommunications is already the largest part of the sector, and SpaceX already the overwhelmingly dominate player.
At some point you need to break into something other then that to be able to continue to grow.
Or maybe my assumption about that is wrong, and combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative.
> its not clear what other markets SpaceX can grow into. The rocket market is small
Ten years ago, smart people said the launch market couldn't possibly grow beyond $3 to 5bn.
There is a tonnne of induced demand when it comes to launch. In LEO alone we have telecommunications, sensing and defence applications, most of which don't do well when put on the same bird. Add to that potential power-transmission uses and a global race to the Moon and Mars and it seems even if Starship can be mass manufactured, production will be the limiter, not demand.
> combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative
Doubtful for broadband. Probable for rural and maybe even suburban cellular.
Ten years ago i already knew that SpaceX was able to build spacecraft, see Dragon. And I already new telecommunications was a big field. That SpaceX would try to expand in sat manufacture was clear and their advantage obvious.
Telecommunications is overwhelmingly the largest space sector, it was in the 90s and is today. Sensing has been around for 60+ years and has grown fast both military and civilian, Planet and co. But its small compared to Telecommunication. And in order to rival that you would need many, many more years of incredibly fast growth.
As for defense application, the most absurd possible one would be Golden Dome. And granted that would be a big chucnk of money if SpaceX can get a huge piece. But I don't think Goldon Dome will happen anytime soon or will be quite a big difference.
You are right that cellular will grow and that's a vector for continued growth of Starlink. So there is decently growth and a lot yet to do. SpaceX a growth company, but justifying 800b on that is a bit questionable. They would need to like 5x in revenue and continue to show massive growth.
As for general 'induced demand', maybe, but we have already seen some of that, and there is growth, but nowhere near the amount of growth for SpaceX to go from 100s to 1000s of launches. Specially with Starship.
There needs to be 3-5 other telecom sized sectors that are actually real. Defense MIGHT be 1.
I just don't see it. Tourism, space mining and space manufacturing would need to happen big time.
There is a lot of talk about 'data centers in space' but I think that is silly. Space solar is even worse.
I think the era where a company’s valuation is defined by its fundamentals is firmly behind us.
is it really absurd? They have massive moat and virtually have no competitors globally.
This has since then been confirmed to not be true:
Source: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1997399963509150089Here’s a good infographic on how dominant SpaceX is in the launch market
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1iarntp/orbit...
Would think that blue origin and project kuiper launching for amazon that would put downward pressure on SpaceX, as they are about to have a huge amount of competition for starlink, as Amazon has massive distribution advantages - wouldn't be surprised introductory bundling with Prime etc...
> as they are about to have a huge amount of competition for starlink
Don't forget about IRIS2!
Your joking right? IRIS2 is mostly for government and has nowhere near the capacity or ground infrastructure necessary. Lets alone the advanced laser links to compete for shipping and planes. Let alone the manufacturing of ground terminals.
Iris2 doesn't require ground terminals, it uses good ol 5G
Iris2 might will support 5G-NTN. But that doesn't many any phone can use it no problem. Even if you use 5G-NTN you want some dedicated terminals, and there are prototypes for that. The exact details for Iris2 is not yet known publicly and there are many vendors trying to get in on it. The specification basically says support 5G-NTN (3GPP) “to the maximum extent possible”. And maybe future handsets will support it better.
But we are decently far from a situation where Iris2 has a dedicated consumer arm that spits out millions of consumer grade standard terminals that people can set up within minutes.
We are still very early, with contracts just signed and many questions still open. And ESA not exactly having a track record of great execution.
Lets remember this system even if you are insane optimistic will not exist fully before 2031. Likely years after that if you take into account all the ongoing issues. And even when it finally arrives, the capacity isn't really designed for mass users against Starlink anyway.
Starlink will soon be (probably already is) 4G/5G capable. I'd be surprised if Kuiper won't get the same capability.
What are you joking? Amazon is super far behind and unlikely to be able to launch its satellites in time to meet its FCC licensing requirements. They won't even be only for 24+ months. Meanwhile Starlink is growing very quickly.
Amazon is not a competitor until they actually have a viable product which they may never achieve.
Starlink is not going to be a monopoly. The other big countries won’t allow it.
Like Tesla, SpaceX was ahead of the game by making big bets on new technology. Over time, that lead erodes when other players start competing. Tesla is now a declining player in EVs rapidly falling behind market leaders in AV and battery tech. I suspect spaceX will have a similar trajectory
Tesla never had unique technology, except maybe the 'software defined car' but that wasn't the big sellers on its own.
Tesla integrated other peoples cells into a nice system, but they were never uniquely good at that. They were successful because they invested a huge amount into scaling battery manufacture faster then anybody in the beginning. Something that everybody could replicate.
SpaceX on the other hand has a true technical advantage. But its also a much smaller market.
China will match Starlink in ~5 years and will push adoption hard through it's Belt and Road initiative, just as it has with it's (admittedly superior) GPS system. Starlink may become the de facto option in the Western world, but it won't have a chance at a global monopoly.
> Starlink may become the de facto option in the Western world, but it won't have a chance at a global monopoly.
Well, the US sphere of influence, at least.
Musk's aggravating enough of Europe that he may find that door is closing and locking.
I wonder if this has more to do with XAi than SpaceX. He recently had SpaceX invest $2B into XAi due to the AI arms race. If SpaceX had unneeded cash sitting around why raise money now?
> why raise money
"SpaceX is kicking off a secondary share sale." It isn't raising money, it's letting insiders sell. In the past, SpaceX has been a net buyer of its shares in such tenders.
Given Musk's pay package that requires getting Tesla's valuation to $8 trillion, isn't it obvious that he should absorb all of his holdings (SpaceX, X, xAI) into Tesla?
That pay package was a reaction to the large problems he is having competing with ESG forces for control of the company. Keeping SpaceX private is another. He described it as trying to keep the robot army he is building out of enemy hands.
What does "ESG forces" add to the discussion other than culture-war flaming?
The accuracy that people want to actively sabotage Elon's plans for Tesla.
It's a big reason why SpaceX is staying private. To understand this news it helps to know that Musk considers ESG to be the enemy.
And wtf is ESG?
Environmental, social, and governance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_gov...
Probably a good idea to do it now, because Trump has made sure SpaceX is about to have yet another European, a Chinese and an Indian competitor soon. 2 out of 3 have already demonstrated landing a rocket, as has Blue origin in the US with the New Glenn launch + landing. Plus a few countries are thinking about it, at least Switzerland, South Korea and Israel if you can believe it.
Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor (by approving the feature on "old" satellites), and China is already doing launches and theirs should be at least partially operational. Russia claims to have a working Starlink competitor and India is building one.
Oh and as for profitability ... not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium, but that was far from the only attempt+bankruptcy building Space internet. Well, the economics are discussed in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y
TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com "We lose on every sale but make it up on volume" style move. So yes, high time to sell the stock indeed.
Oh, and Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars and will be the first private company getting a payload to Mars soon (the "ESCAPADE" mission). As in payload is on the way and there's no way SpaceX can catch up anymore. In fact it's pretty tough finding another rocket manufacturer that has not launched a mission to Mars. Boeing has launched payloads to Mars. Blue origin has. Arianespace has. Russia has. Not especially economically relevant* but worth mentioning. Economics are not what determines either rocket building or launches and hasn't ever done so. Which means rocket launches are cheaper than they can be in private hands.
* what is economically relevant though is that SpaceX is not even saving the US government money. The US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program. Everyone always makes the point that SpaceX is cheaper than SLS. However ... this fails to correctly compare prices for the only options the US government has:
Option 1: pay for SLS
Option 2: pay for SLS and SpaceX.
So really the price of SpaceX rocket launches doesn't even matter, not using SpaceX will be the cheapest option because math.
> Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars
As you said, not especially relevant to a financial discussion.
> as for profitability
SpaceX is profitable.
> US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program
Being the U.S. government's prime contractor while it keeps ULA on life support is a great deal. Same for Europe and Arianespace.
> SpaceX is profitable.
Strange. For me profitable means money_out > money_in, over the whole company history. OpenAI stock is worth 137 billion. Of this, at least 20B was actual money put in (some "free" by the US government). So let's say $18B investment, although that should really be increased by whatever investments were made in Starlink, which is also >$10 billion.
Revenue for SpaceX, with starlink split out (because starlink pays in equity). Obviously, these are guesses.
2024: $14 billion revenue, of which $10b is Starlink investment
2025: $15 billion revenue, of which $11b is Starlink investment
Starlink, when some figures were publicly discussed, in 2023, had $55 million profit on $1.5 billion revenue (but that was counting Starlink shares as cash), about 3.7%
Let's very generously say they doubled that in the past 2 years, and hey, we're being generous, round up. Say they're at 10% margin (Musk's claim, of course, is 60%).
So:
2024: $140 million profit, of which $10b was invested in Starlink
2025: $150 million profit, of which $11b was invested in Starlink
Cashflow:
2024: $-10 billion
2025: $-11 billion
So I think I can be very comfortable in saying that SpaceX is not profitable, it's deep in the red, getting worse over time, only supported by Starlink valuation. With somewhat less confidence I can say it's actually getting less profitable over time, rather than more.
They would need to at least 5x the launches they did in 2024 to just breakeven (while potentially reducing starlink launches to zero, which would make it close to 15x), and they only increased the launches by 20% (138 in 2024 vs 129 launches in 2025 up to october). 20% is generous. There is the question of how much of these launches were Starlink, and for 2025 there is no good data, but up to 2025 Starlink launches increased by over 40%.
My assessment is unless Starlink takes over global internet, SpaceX is bankrupt and will have to sell it's designs and launch technology for pennies on the dollar.
Oh and can I just add, I've interviewed at Starlink and received a (pathetic) offer, which people on reddit claim was pretty typical. Which told me one thing: Starlink is already very aware of the need to drastically save money.
> For me profitable means money_out > money_in, over the whole company history
One, this is a nonsense definition. Two, SpaceX meets it. It’s why it hasn’t fundraised for years.
> I've interviewed at Starlink and received a (pathetic) offer, which people on reddit claim was pretty typical. Which told me one thing: Starlink is already very aware of the need to drastically save money
Wat. Based on this metric, Amazon and Walmart are broke.
> One, this is a nonsense definition. Two, SpaceX meets it. It’s why it hasn’t fundraised for years.
First, It's a private company. You can't know that.
Second, even if true, massive investments were made into Starlink and paid into SpaceX, as I pointed out into my post. That counts as fundraising.
> Wat. Based on this metric, Amazon and Walmart are broke.
Not really. Amazon pays a lot, and for IT Manager roles, so does Walmart.
That is not a standard definition of profitability, and basically a version of the sunk cost fallacy. you dont go bankrupt from sunk costs.
TDLR: A link to bad short-seller video from 4 years ago and a lot of unsustainable claims.
Ridiculous. SpaceX offers a product that costs far less than its competitors while being as good or better in most respects. Their profit margins on launches must be enormous at this point.
That in turn enables Starlink. They can put up thousands of satellites very cheaply. Then they can turn around and sell subscriptions. Starlink has about 8 million active customers. At $40+/month, that's at least $4 billion/year in revenue. Probably a lot more. Given their launch costs, that's a ton of profit.
"not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before" is just... not true. Nothing like it was ever tried before. Iridium is the only one that came even vaguely close, and it was still a radically different type of service. Iridium was extremely low capacity phone service, then low-bandwidth (it made dialup look super fast by comparison) data, with a network of a few dozen satellites covering the globe. It could not support many customers because it had few satellites. It also had to pay for launches in the 1990s, so an order of magnitude or more costlier. That means that it was enormously expensive, for a product few people actually needed. Handsets cost thousands of dollars, then you got to pay several dollars per minute on top of that.
Iridium was basically space dialup, and extremely expensive space dialup at that. Starlink is space broadband, and their cheap launch costs and other technological advancements mean the service is profitable at a competitive price point.
Option 1 isn’t really an option, unfortunately. There are no viable single launch options using it. So it’s really SLS x 2. But building and launching one SLS at a time is almost too much as it is. If that’s the only option, I think Artemis is dead and we should start over.
> Plus Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars
What about that Tesla that regularly crosses Mars orbit? Ok, it's not on Mars, but it was just about calculating an orbit. They could have smashed it on Mars as well.
Injecting a dummy payload into an eccentric helicentric orbit which periodically crosses' Mars' orbit /= a Mars mission. The complexity and relevance to future human presence on Mars isn't close
(Though tbf the choice of launch vehicle isn't that relevant to whether the ESCAPADE mission succeeds, and missions involving Mars flybys like Hera which are lot more serious than the Tesla one have been launched on SpaceX rockets)
If injecting a payload into an eccentric heliocentric orbit doesn't count, then why does injecting a payload into MEO count, just because that payload is then capable of getting to Mars from there? BO didn't launch it to Mars, they launched it to orbit, and ESCAPADE is now getting itself to Mars.
Nice, the wording of "smashed it". Because, the point of getting to Mars or Mars orbit is that you need rocket burns to insert and to land on Mars. Getting to places in space is a delta-V game and paying only half your delta-V costs doesn't count because it doesn't work.
If that's why it matters, then why are you crediting BO for that when they didn't have anything to do with the parts which will be performing those burns?
I guess they get partial credit if those parts and payload are heavier than the car.
Alas for BO’s credit, the two spacecraft together are only a little over one ton.
Yep, he is desperate for cash, he is leveraged to the hilt on his shares which is why he desperately begs his fanboys for more. His empire is a house of cards.
> as has Blue origin in the US
Blue Origin is losing many billions every year and has only survived thanks to a hobby project. And even if they continue, to get to SpaceX like cadence is a long way away, and many more billions in investment.
Europe is a decade plus behind and has no way ever to get to the launch cadence. And even then they have 0 chance competing for international launch. And a true Starlink competitor out of Europe is fantasy.
> Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor
No it doesn't.
> .. not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium
If you really think Starlink and Iridium are comparable, you should get your head checked.
And just because something hasn't worked before, doesn't mean changing technology doesn't change that.
The question you should ask is "Are there historical example where a 10x drop in cost allowed for a new much larger volume in an industry". And if you look at it that way, its patently obvious.
SpaceX doesn't even need to pay itself margin, if SpaceX had to fully buy SpaceX launches, the economics would be a lot worse.
> TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com
This is analysis where my only conclusion is that you just hate Musk and SpaceX for political reasons.
Did pets.com make like 10 billion in revenue and had many major militaries as costumers? I must have missed that.
> so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program.
It does have a choice the US doesn't need to publicly fund anything. They already have ULA, SpaceX, BlueOrigin, Rocket Lab, Stoke space, Relativity.
> Everyone always makes the point that SpaceX is cheaper than SLS. However ... this fails to correctly compare prices for the only options the US government has:
You act as if SLS is the law of the universe, but it isn't. Anybody with a brain has known for 10+ years that eventually the US will switch to commercial rocket launch. As NASA has already mostly done, and DoD has done 100% already.
SLS is the last vestige of a dying system of cronies from the Shuttle days. It has not future. Only a long political fight to suck up as many resources at can be extract from congress before it inevitably dies.
The future in the US is clear, competitive launch with SpaceX as the leading provider and ULA, Blue and friends competing for contracts.
Every time someone mentions Eutelsat as a competitor I'm reminded that my own friend group has multiple people who can simply buy the entire company, which sort of describes how successful it is.
Option 1 isn't an option, really. NSSL policy is to ensure that there are two independent providers so that Assured Access To Space can work.
[dead]
Why not a $40T valuation? Let's really think big here. /s
If SpaceX doesn't get Starship operational soon, they're going to lose their advantage to Blue Origin and probably at least one of the several Chinese rocket companies.
Even without Starship Falcon Heavy is still competitive with New Glenn, and nobody is anywhere close to competing with Starlink (Amazon is still far behind, as is ASTS). And if Starship works SpaceX will still be in the lead for a long, long time.
IMO the only remaining unanswered question for the Starship program is the reusability of the heat shield. There's no reason to believe any other part of it can't work.
I always had the impression that the propellant transfer was the harder question than the heat shield. They have done a transfer demo from one internal tank to another, but they still need to test from one ship to another ship.
I only casually follow the news from r/spacex, but prop transfer is what I see generate the most discussion. It’s a hard requirement for all deep space missions. Where the heat shield could be refurbished between launches.
The heat shield may be a "we don't know how to do the physics" problem, where propellant transfer is a "complex integration of well understood components" problem. If the heat shield requires per launch refurbishment it cripples the colonization dream.
Deep space missions yes. But Starlink isn't deep space - and neither is the vast majority of commercial payloads.
Propellant transfer is relevant because it's vital for sending entire Starships to Moon and Mars - which are the exciting Starship missions. This includes Artemis. But commercially? Artemis contract isn't even a large part of SpaceX's revenue.
Propellant transfer, with cryogenic propellants, can be done using cryocoolers. It's not too hard of a problem. Besides, Starship only needs prop transfer for Moon and Mars missions, but the later are fantasy and the former probably isn't going to happen either, and actually just regular LEO launches with a fully reusable rocket is where most of the money is anyway.
The heat shield is a huge problem though. Without the heat shield, there's simply no way SpaceX can use Starship to make money.
Heat shield reuse is a big deal for orbital refueling too, because it requires 12+ launches in a short time frame. If you don't have heat shield reuse then you need 12+ Starships and 12+ refurbishments per mission.
Propellant transfer isn’t necessary for starlink launches.
Why do you think transfer of propellant is so difficult? We do propellant transfer all the time in space. The only real different is that the liquid is colder and Starship is just plane bigger.
But we pipe around cold stuff in space internal to space ships already quite often.
What is the fundamental limitation that you worried about?
I would say the head-shield is far harder an an unsolved problem, specially with re-use. Refurbish is not economically viable, specially not after 1 launch. That would be against every design goal of Starship. It has never been demonstrated in a practical fashion.
I really want SpaceX to succeed, but the Starship heat shield situation seems quite fucked. I heard they're even reconsidering active cooling now. Maybe they'll figure something out but I don't consider that a foregone conclusion.
New Glenn has an edge over Falcon Heavy and possibly over Starship when it comes to payload volume.
> IMO the only remaining unanswered question for the Starship program is the reusability of the heat shield. There's no reason to believe any other part of it can't work.
Is there a tldr someone put together here ?
Is that different from, say, a year ago? The Starship concept seems technically sound, and the doubt is about whether SpaceX can actually get there, given the rather slow (visible) pace of progress.
China is currently building TWO competing starlink-type systems. Given the trajectory of China in recent years, I no longer say "nobody is anywhere close to competing with..." about pretty much anything.
China's constellations are roughly where Starlink was in early 2020, except that their launch costs remain much higher. Yes, they move fast, but SpaceX is one of the few US companies I'd bet on to compete with them.
Also, I wonder how receptive the world will be to Chinese ISPs given their history of internet censorship at home.
SpaceX is ultimately still an American company operating at American scale vs PRC. Last year spaceX had fleet of 18 F9s doing more than 50% of global launches, 80% including starlink. SpaceX stans fixate over 50% and 80%, but ignore that 18 rocket cores is rookie numbers. 7/145 US space launches in 2024 was Non SpaceX. That means US in aggregate build ~25 rockets (i think less since some SpaceX are older cores). Versus PRC 68, about ~80 tyhis year (missing keep missing goal of 100). So we can already see there's a 4-5x difference in total launch vehicles production. When/if PRC sorts out reusables, they get both cadence x volume, and no telling how far they can extend the gap, if anything like auto, fast enough that they can overtake SpaceX in historic payload within a few years. Assuming payload enough demand, which I doubt... outside space weaponization arms race.
I think the world, well mainly govs, many of whom who are already running Huawei network gear would appreciate PRC willingness to accomodate local filtering (censorship) rules with how world is trending towards cyber soveignty.
That said, I can see SpaceX being elevated to Boeing tier strategic asset to compete, assuming Musk badblood doesn't interfere.
SpaceX is absolutely capable of building 80 rockets, if they needed to. Don't forget that they built 132 F9 second stages last year, plus thousands of satellites and millions of user terminals. But they don't need to build 80 first stages because their first stages are getting reused 30 times. Why would they waste time building first stages they don't need? China needs to build 80 full rockets because theirs explode after each use.
Meanwhile the Starship factory is looking like it will be quite productive once the design is locked down.
Upperstage stage 1/6 weight with simple merlin engine. SpaceX might need to build 80 first stages if PRC reusable ends up building 80 first stages that's also reusable 30 times. Whether SpaceX can actually build and operate 80 first stages (very likely), and their associated second stages (more questionable) or realistically 100, or 200, we don't actually know, but we know basically in any mature industry PRC can outscale US capabilities, sometimes dramatically, i.e. 200-300x in shipbuilding.
The low build rate is a consequence of success not an indicator of failure. Falcon 9 gets 30+ flights per core, you don’t need to build 60+ rockets.
The point is once PRC figures out reusables and operates a 100/200/300 fleet of reusables, is SpaceX which is more or less entire American space industrial base able to match. Or it it going to go the way of EV or any other PRC high capacity industry where US can't.
> several Chinese rocket companies
As much as I want to fly with Chinese rocket to encourage launcher competition and redundancy, export controls prevent me from doing that.
That's for you, but that won't stop the rest of the world
I don’t see how. SpaceX is still very agile and has the most reliable launch platform
Perhaps. But history suggests that "soon" will still be 6+ years. Scaling up from the first few successful launches of a(n orbital) rocket, to high-frequency / high-reliability / low cost launches of that rocket, appears to be extremely difficult.