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With 8,000 employees, SpaceX has a payroll of almost $150 million/month, plus other operating costs. Sounds like they're in financial trouble and need to raise

With 8,000 employees, SpaceX has a payroll of almost $150 million/month, plus other operating costs. Sounds like they're in financial trouble and need to raise to continue operating. Note that there's a very small world-wide market for satellite launches, which won't pay for the above. The reusable feature of SpaceX is a business mistake, as noted by both ULA and ESA. Elon Musk is a welfare queen, as all of his businesses rely on govt. handouts and rebates.

randomsearch 5y ago
> The reusable feature of SpaceX is a business mistake Hell of a citation needed moment.
- hef19898 5y ago
  It is impossible to proof either way, unless we would see the full SpaceX financials. The ESA study referenced by OP, I am unable to find it again came to that conclusion years ago. The main reason was limited number of launches. Now SpaceX is raising money to launch Starlink in their own reusable rockets, increasing the number commercial low orbit launches. So yes, they deserve some scrutiny over that.
  - nickik 5y ago
    ESA just spent almost 4 billion $ on their newest rocket despite it being basically a incremental improvement over the Ariane 6 will parts that have been in development for decades. I wouldn't trust their cost analysis. ULA did the same type of analysis as well. Funny how the failing competition is convinced that its the wrong move. Unlike Arianespace, SpaceX is not a jobs-program. SpaceX is happy if they don't have to have so many people in the production at all times, as they have many other things that need to be worked on. Arianespace is the opposite, they get money to produce jobs, if they have to reduce production because of re-usability then politicians would get angry. Also funny how ESA is investing 100s of million into re-usability right now and is planning their next rocket to be re-usable. And at the same time basically all upcoming new launch companies like RocketLab and Relativity have re-usability as a big part of their strategy. Its as if they know that without re-usability they have no chance in hell of competing.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      The study was from the early 2000s, if I remember correctly. And yeah, things have changed since then. Back then, and to me the numbers made sense, the conclusion was: not enough launches of smaller payloads into low orbit to make it profitable. And reusability isn't feasible for larger payloads or higher orbits (not sure how much and high SpaceX launches stuff with reusable rockets). I would love to see SpaceX financials, without them all we are left with is advertised launch costs, Musks Tweets, money raised and financials from the competition. That is like calculating airline costs and profitability based on Spirits quarterly figures and Ryan Airs special offerings between Dublin and some provincial German airport.
      - nickik 5y ago
        The problem is ESA/Arianespace rocket simply operate very differently. Because of solid boosters and hydrogen first stage, the first stage for their rocket reaches a far higher speed then SpaceX first stage does. And that makes it much harder to recover, and much more costly. SpaceX regularly recovers boosters for GEO missions and soon even moon missions, because it doesn't matter so much for them, the profile of the first stage is not all that different. If the Falcon 9 can't handle it, they rather use the Falcon Heavy and land that, rather then throw away a Falcon 9 core. Only in the most extreme situation, would Falcon Heavy drop its core booster. SpaceX has 1 mission on its books that will require the Falcon Heavy booster to expand its core. The side booster would still land in this case. So SpaceX has 100+ launches on its manifest right now and of all those a single launch is planned to not fully reuse its first stage. > I would love to see SpaceX financials Your not the only one. We have lots of different analysis that have been done and most put marginal internal cost for a SpaceX mission to 20-30 million. And SpaceX sells launches for 60M, with extra cost depending on what costumers ask for.
      - acd10j 5y ago
        *And yeah, things have changed since then* and who enabled those changes ? Progress is not function of time, if left to themselves, ULA , Arian et al, would have never let these launch costs go down. Even now Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy is capable of launching a very high orbits with quite good payload. Which will be further boosted by Star-ship.
  - randomsearch 5y ago
    > It is impossible to proof either way, unless we would see the full SpaceX financials. I think we can just sit back and see how SpaceX do, ask ourselves were reusable rockets necessary for that, and it will be enough. If SpaceX dominate planetary internet, get to the moon, or get to Mars, I reckon we can probably say it was a good call. It's a credit to HN's contrarianism that the idea of reusable rockets is bad for business, but at some point you have to give in to reality. Perhaps Airbus should start scrapping their planes after every flight to boost their income.
- resonantjacket5 5y ago
  Taking a bit overly generous interpretation of redis_mlc's comment I assume they are referring to how SpaceX's reusable rockets brought the cost of rockets too low combined with the demand for rockets actually being much more inelastic leading SpaceX with a bunch of cheap rockets without adequate buyers. Aka why SpaceX went forward with the StarLink program as it requires a massive number of satellites
krasin 5y ago
This comment ignores existence of Starlink that already proved the tech and business model, while also having a considerably lower cost to build the constellation than competition thanks to the reusability.
- walrus01 5y ago
  Additionally it ignores the well documented and known (they're public companies) yearly revenue from the top 15 largest geostationary satellite owners/operators, which starlink is going to absolutely take a huge percentage of business from.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    This - the reports of Starlink's speed and performance are incredible. They're going to wind up being the sole provider of internet services to the US military in a couple of years at minimum.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      I wouldn't go so far as to say sole, the US DoD has plenty of their own very high costly and capable geostationary satellites in addition to the commercial transponder capacity they purchase. I'm referring to the AEHF, WGS, UFO and similar programs. And they'll definitely want some belt and suspenders type redundancy. If and when Kuiper actually becomes a real thing, or oneweb (the UK government investment and ownership stake is encouraging, there), I don't see them sole sourcing to starlink either. But all I can say is that I'm glad my 401k doesn't include any geostationary operators in it.
      - skissane 5y ago
        > If and when Kuiper actually becomes a real thing, or oneweb (the UK government investment and ownership stake is encouraging, there), I don't see them sole sourcing to starlink either. Starlink has far greater capability than Oneweb, simply due to having a much bigger constellation. Oneweb can't compete with Starlink in terms of constellation size, because unlike SpaceX they don't own their own launch vehicles. What is the motivation for having a second-source to Starlink – technical, economic, political? If it is political, Oneweb may have the disadvantage of being a UK-headquartered company not a US-headquartered one, so that gives the US military a political reason to prefer Starlink (on top of its technical advantages). Unless the US is particularly interested to gain the UK government's favour – and the Biden administration doesn't appear to be particularly interested in that OTOH, Oneweb has a good chance of getting the UK government and military's business, being UK-headquartered and partially UK-government owned. But the US government/military is a higher value customer than the UK government/military – the US military's annual budget is over 16 times that of the UK's. I think Project Kuiper being US-owned has a greater chance of getting US military business. But they haven't launched anything yet, and it isn't clear when they are going to start. Their launch costs are likely to be higher than SpaceX's, and SpaceX has a big head-start in the market, which put them at a disadvantage.
jkelleyrtp 5y ago
I find it disappointing how many people on HN post these types of comments, and just the general sentiment of the internet nowadays. I don't know what compels you to make such negative comments. SpaceX has a solid track record, extremely profound technical achievements, and very compelling goals (interplanetary humanity!). I think less cynicism would go a long way, unless you're leading your own rocket company that outperforms SpaceX in these regards.
- LeCow 5y ago
  Christ, they deserve legitimate criticism. Just because you like them doesn't make them immune or OP wrong. They have a marked history of missing deadlines and budget over runs. Least we forget they promised cheap international travel via rocket, without any safety mechanisms, that takes 40 minutes to get around the world, to start being operational next year.
  - echelon 5y ago
    They can land rockets on autonomous boats, for goodness sake.
  - skissane 5y ago
    One can make legitimate criticisms without engaging in the flamewar style of "Elon Musk is a welfare queen", as the great-grandparent comment does. That kind of unnecessarily inflammatory language distracts from serious discussion of criticisms.
    - enlyth 5y ago
      I think a lot of people are frustrated about how so many idolize him to the point where anything he is involved in is immune to criticism.
      - skissane 5y ago
        I worry that the opposite problem also exists – that if one disagrees with some criticism of Elon Musk or one of his companies, one is sometimes then accused of "idolising him" or of viewing him as "immune to criticism". I think the vast majority of SpaceX fans would agree there are valid criticisms of Elon Musk. A couple of obvious ones: (a) his timelines are usually overly optimistic – he delivers a lot, but he very often delivers it later (sometimes even a lot later) than he initially said he would; (b) sometimes he speaks off-the-cuff too much (especially on Twitter) and ends up saying things he (very likely) later regrets saying (such as the 'pedo guy' episode, or the 'taking Tesla private' episode)
drenvuk 5y ago
i would invest in every single stock that you would short.
TheButlerian 5y ago
Suck dick faggot ass bitch.
gvv 5y ago
Yeah we should better give that money to the army and destroy another country in the Middle East? We could've been on Mars by now given the military industrial complex expenditure.
nickik 5y ago
What utter nonsense. Sure the investors are willing to invest so much money into a failing company at a high evaluation because they are such idiots? > Note that there's a very small world-wide market for satellite launches, which won't pay for the above. They are raising money for Starlink, not sat launching. > The reusable feature of SpaceX is a business mistake, as noted by both ULA and ESA. ESA is spending 100s of million researching re-usability and developing reusable engines, their next rocket after Ariane 6 will be reusable. Arianespace has already admitted that Ariane 6 is not competitive and have asked Europe to force all domestic launches onto Ariane 6. ULA is military created monopoly all their rockets were built with government money and in their whole existence they were utterly non-competitive in the international launch market. Taking their word for what is the right way to compete in the international rocket market is like taking sex advice from a priest. Fact is, ULA doesn't know how to create a re-usable rocket and the parent companies don't want to invest the money to figure it out. > Elon Musk is a welfare queen, as all of his businesses rely on govt. handouts and rebates. Also wrong.
- baq 5y ago
  ULA's Atlas 5 at least has an enviable reliability record, so it isn't all bad.
  - nickik 5y ago
    That is true, they are reliable. But we shouldn't go overboard with that. It used to their claim to fame was 'we launch on time reliably'. The 'we launch on time' is now no longer true, they had lots of issue with that recently. Arianespace had such issues too, Ariane 5 was actually grounded for most of last year. SpaceX is a far more reliable on time to launch by now. SpaceX has insurance cost as low or lower and they are certified for all military and NASA payloads. Including bieng certified for humans before Atlas 5 was. In terms of reliability the newest version of Falcon 9 that has the human rating is rapidly approaching 100 flights and never had a failure. Even if you account for all Falcon 9 launches, their reliability is still very good. Atlas 5 recently had a shutdown of the first stage engine and only because the 2nd stage was overpowered it was able to barley compensate. Had the payload been just a little heavier it would have been a launch failure. Arianespace also had reliability issues, they recently launched a payload somewhat in the wrong direction because they had the wrong software on the rocket.
Tuna-Fish 5y ago
> The reusable feature of SpaceX is a business mistake, as noted by both ULA and ESA. The ESA analysis was perfectly correct, for the launch rates they were projecting. Since then, SpaceX has unveiled plans and started filling out a constellation of 42000 satellites. That rather increased launch rates, to the point where SpaceX launched more than half of all the mass to orbit last year. If they stick to their schedule, they will launch 75% this year. This changes the math of how profitable reuse is.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Which just moved the goal post, didn't it? I mean Starlink is, in some sense, artificially created demand by SpaceX themselves. As oppossed to ESA, Ariane Space and others that depend on government launches and commercial business from third parties.
  - Tuna-Fish 5y ago
    Well, it is demand they created themselves. It also has a path to being so wildly profitable it probably exceeds all the other revenue from space by all other companies put together. It has been known since the 60's that if launch rates go way up, the cost per launch can be made to go way down. It has been known since the 90's that there is market for a massive internet constellation, but it won't be profitable at current launch prices. Neither problem could be solved, because they depended on each other, and required massive, tens-of-billions-of-dollars level of investment. You can't really spend big money to make a very efficient launch system that is not suitable for current market and hope that customers will come. And you cannot really spend big money to build the infrastructure to turn out satellites like cars when the launch costs would still sink the whole project. SpaceX managed to collect enough private funding, that they could do tackle both problems at the same time. If they succeed, they will be the most profitable aerospace company the world has ever seen. Which is probably why they have so little trouble raising the funding.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      Then we agree to disagree. SpaceX is private funding, Ariane Space and others government contracts. Which SpaceX is also getting, by the way. To me, Starlink is for SpaceX what self-driving taxis are for Tesla. And whether Starlink is actually profitable, after SpaceX moved that question on to them, can be further pushed out by raising VC money for Starlink. This plays on so many levels, every VC pumped start-up plays this with so many markets and competitors. Maybe money really is to cheap and plenty full in general since 2008.

randomsearch 5y ago

> The reusable feature of SpaceX is a business mistake Hell of a citation needed moment.

hef19898 5y ago
It is impossible to proof either way, unless we would see the full SpaceX financials. The ESA study referenced by OP, I am unable to find it again came to that conclusion years ago. The main reason was limited number of launches. Now SpaceX is raising money to launch Starlink in their own reusable rockets, increasing the number commercial low orbit launches. So yes, they deserve some scrutiny over that.
- nickik 5y ago
  ESA just spent almost 4 billion $ on their newest rocket despite it being basically a incremental improvement over the Ariane 6 will parts that have been in development for decades. I wouldn't trust their cost analysis. ULA did the same type of analysis as well. Funny how the failing competition is convinced that its the wrong move. Unlike Arianespace, SpaceX is not a jobs-program. SpaceX is happy if they don't have to have so many people in the production at all times, as they have many other things that need to be worked on. Arianespace is the opposite, they get money to produce jobs, if they have to reduce production because of re-usability then politicians would get angry. Also funny how ESA is investing 100s of million into re-usability right now and is planning their next rocket to be re-usable. And at the same time basically all upcoming new launch companies like RocketLab and Relativity have re-usability as a big part of their strategy. Its as if they know that without re-usability they have no chance in hell of competing.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    The study was from the early 2000s, if I remember correctly. And yeah, things have changed since then. Back then, and to me the numbers made sense, the conclusion was: not enough launches of smaller payloads into low orbit to make it profitable. And reusability isn't feasible for larger payloads or higher orbits (not sure how much and high SpaceX launches stuff with reusable rockets). I would love to see SpaceX financials, without them all we are left with is advertised launch costs, Musks Tweets, money raised and financials from the competition. That is like calculating airline costs and profitability based on Spirits quarterly figures and Ryan Airs special offerings between Dublin and some provincial German airport.
    - nickik 5y ago
      The problem is ESA/Arianespace rocket simply operate very differently. Because of solid boosters and hydrogen first stage, the first stage for their rocket reaches a far higher speed then SpaceX first stage does. And that makes it much harder to recover, and much more costly. SpaceX regularly recovers boosters for GEO missions and soon even moon missions, because it doesn't matter so much for them, the profile of the first stage is not all that different. If the Falcon 9 can't handle it, they rather use the Falcon Heavy and land that, rather then throw away a Falcon 9 core. Only in the most extreme situation, would Falcon Heavy drop its core booster. SpaceX has 1 mission on its books that will require the Falcon Heavy booster to expand its core. The side booster would still land in this case. So SpaceX has 100+ launches on its manifest right now and of all those a single launch is planned to not fully reuse its first stage. > I would love to see SpaceX financials Your not the only one. We have lots of different analysis that have been done and most put marginal internal cost for a SpaceX mission to 20-30 million. And SpaceX sells launches for 60M, with extra cost depending on what costumers ask for.
    - acd10j 5y ago
      *And yeah, things have changed since then* and who enabled those changes ? Progress is not function of time, if left to themselves, ULA , Arian et al, would have never let these launch costs go down. Even now Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy is capable of launching a very high orbits with quite good payload. Which will be further boosted by Star-ship.
- randomsearch 5y ago
  > It is impossible to proof either way, unless we would see the full SpaceX financials. I think we can just sit back and see how SpaceX do, ask ourselves were reusable rockets necessary for that, and it will be enough. If SpaceX dominate planetary internet, get to the moon, or get to Mars, I reckon we can probably say it was a good call. It's a credit to HN's contrarianism that the idea of reusable rockets is bad for business, but at some point you have to give in to reality. Perhaps Airbus should start scrapping their planes after every flight to boost their income.
resonantjacket5 5y ago
Taking a bit overly generous interpretation of redis_mlc's comment I assume they are referring to how SpaceX's reusable rockets brought the cost of rockets too low combined with the demand for rockets actually being much more inelastic leading SpaceX with a bunch of cheap rockets without adequate buyers. Aka why SpaceX went forward with the StarLink program as it requires a massive number of satellites

krasin 5y ago

This comment ignores existence of Starlink that already proved the tech and business model, while also having a considerably lower cost to build the constellation than competition thanks to the reusability.

walrus01 5y ago
Additionally it ignores the well documented and known (they're public companies) yearly revenue from the top 15 largest geostationary satellite owners/operators, which starlink is going to absolutely take a huge percentage of business from.
- XorNot 5y ago
  This - the reports of Starlink's speed and performance are incredible. They're going to wind up being the sole provider of internet services to the US military in a couple of years at minimum.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    I wouldn't go so far as to say sole, the US DoD has plenty of their own very high costly and capable geostationary satellites in addition to the commercial transponder capacity they purchase. I'm referring to the AEHF, WGS, UFO and similar programs. And they'll definitely want some belt and suspenders type redundancy. If and when Kuiper actually becomes a real thing, or oneweb (the UK government investment and ownership stake is encouraging, there), I don't see them sole sourcing to starlink either. But all I can say is that I'm glad my 401k doesn't include any geostationary operators in it.
    - skissane 5y ago
      > If and when Kuiper actually becomes a real thing, or oneweb (the UK government investment and ownership stake is encouraging, there), I don't see them sole sourcing to starlink either. Starlink has far greater capability than Oneweb, simply due to having a much bigger constellation. Oneweb can't compete with Starlink in terms of constellation size, because unlike SpaceX they don't own their own launch vehicles. What is the motivation for having a second-source to Starlink – technical, economic, political? If it is political, Oneweb may have the disadvantage of being a UK-headquartered company not a US-headquartered one, so that gives the US military a political reason to prefer Starlink (on top of its technical advantages). Unless the US is particularly interested to gain the UK government's favour – and the Biden administration doesn't appear to be particularly interested in that OTOH, Oneweb has a good chance of getting the UK government and military's business, being UK-headquartered and partially UK-government owned. But the US government/military is a higher value customer than the UK government/military – the US military's annual budget is over 16 times that of the UK's. I think Project Kuiper being US-owned has a greater chance of getting US military business. But they haven't launched anything yet, and it isn't clear when they are going to start. Their launch costs are likely to be higher than SpaceX's, and SpaceX has a big head-start in the market, which put them at a disadvantage.

jkelleyrtp 5y ago

I find it disappointing how many people on HN post these types of comments, and just the general sentiment of the internet nowadays. I don't know what compels you to make such negative comments. SpaceX has a solid track record, extremely profound technical achievements, and very compelling goals (interplanetary humanity!). I think less cynicism would go a long way, unless you're leading your own rocket company that outperforms SpaceX in these regards.

LeCow 5y ago
Christ, they deserve legitimate criticism. Just because you like them doesn't make them immune or OP wrong. They have a marked history of missing deadlines and budget over runs. Least we forget they promised cheap international travel via rocket, without any safety mechanisms, that takes 40 minutes to get around the world, to start being operational next year.
- echelon 5y ago
  They can land rockets on autonomous boats, for goodness sake.
- skissane 5y ago
  One can make legitimate criticisms without engaging in the flamewar style of "Elon Musk is a welfare queen", as the great-grandparent comment does. That kind of unnecessarily inflammatory language distracts from serious discussion of criticisms.
  - enlyth 5y ago
    I think a lot of people are frustrated about how so many idolize him to the point where anything he is involved in is immune to criticism.
    - skissane 5y ago
      I worry that the opposite problem also exists – that if one disagrees with some criticism of Elon Musk or one of his companies, one is sometimes then accused of "idolising him" or of viewing him as "immune to criticism". I think the vast majority of SpaceX fans would agree there are valid criticisms of Elon Musk. A couple of obvious ones: (a) his timelines are usually overly optimistic – he delivers a lot, but he very often delivers it later (sometimes even a lot later) than he initially said he would; (b) sometimes he speaks off-the-cuff too much (especially on Twitter) and ends up saying things he (very likely) later regrets saying (such as the 'pedo guy' episode, or the 'taking Tesla private' episode)

drenvuk 5y ago

i would invest in every single stock that you would short.

TheButlerian 5y ago

Suck dick faggot ass bitch.

gvv 5y ago

Yeah we should better give that money to the army and destroy another country in the Middle East? We could've been on Mars by now given the military industrial complex expenditure.

nickik 5y ago

What utter nonsense. Sure the investors are willing to invest so much money into a failing company at a high evaluation because they are such idiots? > Note that there's a very small world-wide market for satellite launches, which won't pay for the above. They are raising money for Starlink, not sat launching. > The reusable feature of SpaceX is a business mistake, as noted by both ULA and ESA. ESA is spending 100s of million researching re-usability and developing reusable engines, their next rocket after Ariane 6 will be reusable. Arianespace has already admitted that Ariane 6 is not competitive and have asked Europe to force all domestic launches onto Ariane 6. ULA is military created monopoly all their rockets were built with government money and in their whole existence they were utterly non-competitive in the international launch market. Taking their word for what is the right way to compete in the international rocket market is like taking sex advice from a priest. Fact is, ULA doesn't know how to create a re-usable rocket and the parent companies don't want to invest the money to figure it out. > Elon Musk is a welfare queen, as all of his businesses rely on govt. handouts and rebates. Also wrong.

baq 5y ago
ULA's Atlas 5 at least has an enviable reliability record, so it isn't all bad.
- nickik 5y ago
  That is true, they are reliable. But we shouldn't go overboard with that. It used to their claim to fame was 'we launch on time reliably'. The 'we launch on time' is now no longer true, they had lots of issue with that recently. Arianespace had such issues too, Ariane 5 was actually grounded for most of last year. SpaceX is a far more reliable on time to launch by now. SpaceX has insurance cost as low or lower and they are certified for all military and NASA payloads. Including bieng certified for humans before Atlas 5 was. In terms of reliability the newest version of Falcon 9 that has the human rating is rapidly approaching 100 flights and never had a failure. Even if you account for all Falcon 9 launches, their reliability is still very good. Atlas 5 recently had a shutdown of the first stage engine and only because the 2nd stage was overpowered it was able to barley compensate. Had the payload been just a little heavier it would have been a launch failure. Arianespace also had reliability issues, they recently launched a payload somewhat in the wrong direction because they had the wrong software on the rocket.

Tuna-Fish 5y ago

> The reusable feature of SpaceX is a business mistake, as noted by both ULA and ESA. The ESA analysis was perfectly correct, for the launch rates they were projecting. Since then, SpaceX has unveiled plans and started filling out a constellation of 42000 satellites. That rather increased launch rates, to the point where SpaceX launched more than half of all the mass to orbit last year. If they stick to their schedule, they will launch 75% this year. This changes the math of how profitable reuse is.

hef19898 5y ago
Which just moved the goal post, didn't it? I mean Starlink is, in some sense, artificially created demand by SpaceX themselves. As oppossed to ESA, Ariane Space and others that depend on government launches and commercial business from third parties.
- Tuna-Fish 5y ago
  Well, it is demand they created themselves. It also has a path to being so wildly profitable it probably exceeds all the other revenue from space by all other companies put together. It has been known since the 60's that if launch rates go way up, the cost per launch can be made to go way down. It has been known since the 90's that there is market for a massive internet constellation, but it won't be profitable at current launch prices. Neither problem could be solved, because they depended on each other, and required massive, tens-of-billions-of-dollars level of investment. You can't really spend big money to make a very efficient launch system that is not suitable for current market and hope that customers will come. And you cannot really spend big money to build the infrastructure to turn out satellites like cars when the launch costs would still sink the whole project. SpaceX managed to collect enough private funding, that they could do tackle both problems at the same time. If they succeed, they will be the most profitable aerospace company the world has ever seen. Which is probably why they have so little trouble raising the funding.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Then we agree to disagree. SpaceX is private funding, Ariane Space and others government contracts. Which SpaceX is also getting, by the way. To me, Starlink is for SpaceX what self-driving taxis are for Tesla. And whether Starlink is actually profitable, after SpaceX moved that question on to them, can be further pushed out by raising VC money for Starlink. This plays on so many levels, every VC pumped start-up plays this with so many markets and competitors. Maybe money really is to cheap and plenty full in general since 2008.