4 ms·

Businesses like SpaceX and Blue Origin are really prestige/passion projects, not normal capitalist enterprises which are all just about making a buck.

by kiba 3y ago

nordsieck 3y ago
> Businesses like SpaceX and Blue Origin are really prestige/passion projects, not normal capitalist enterprises which are all just about making a buck. Maybe that's true of Blue Origin, but you're going to need a lot more evidence to back up that claim in regards to SpaceX. The best estimate is that they make a >50% gross margin on Falcon 9 launches (at least for external customers). And while they spend a lot on Starlink launches, they're also making quite a lot of Starlink revenue at this point. It's certainly true that they're dumping a lot of R&D money into Starship. But that strategy is how they earned their current medium/heavy lift launch market dominance, so I can't really fault them for that. And if Starship does work out, it could set them up for a functional monopoly on launch for decades. Not to mention dramatically decreasing their internal Starlink costs.
- timschmidt 3y ago
  With SpaceX, colonizing Mars is the passion / prestige project. Elon and his people are extraordinarily good at finding ways to make all the dependent sub-projects profitable while working toward the larger goal. Which is as impressive as the engineering.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    Mars colonization is not their business. Launching commercial payloads is. Everything else is just marketing.
    - timschmidt 3y ago
      Cynicism like this is tiring. To you, the moon landing must have been just marketing until Neil Armstrong stepped off the last ladder rung, but there was a decade of intense engineering effort leading up to that. You are seeing that intense engineering effort toward a Mars landing now. One does not build the largest and most powerful rocket ever constructed simply to deliver packages.
  - soperj 3y ago
    > With SpaceX, colonizing Mars is the passion / prestige project. That's more just a out there goal to motivate people who are motivated by that. Still have had zero launches to Mars.
    - timschmidt 3y ago
      Cynicism like this is tiring. To you, the moon landing must have been just marketing until Neil Armstrong stepped off the last ladder rung, but there was a decade of intense engineering effort leading up to that. You are seeing that intense engineering effort toward a Mars landing now. One does not build the largest and most powerful rocket ever constructed simply to deliver packages.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Being a passion project doesn't preclude making a profit. Especially if you're not being stupidly short sighted. Plus, other companies are having a hard enough time competing already (even small launch is facing tough competition from the F9 rideshares), if SpaceX dropped their prices too low, it'd quickly run most of the launch market out of business, which is not in the interests of a company that wants to improve accessibility to space. This is also why even if Starship's cost targets pan out, they'll likely just charge slightly lower than competing options for the specific payload.
  - nordsieck 3y ago
    > Being a passion project doesn't preclude making a profit. Especially if you're not being stupidly short sighted. OK. But the comment I responded to call it a passion/prestige project and contracted it with a normal profit driven business. > This is also why even if Starship's cost targets pan out, they'll likely just charge slightly lower than competing options for the specific payload. Yeah. SpaceX hasn't said anything, but I tend to believe that they'll move to a capabilities based pricing model where customers pay by the KG and/or m^3. That way they can compete for small payloads while getting paid appropriately for large ones.
    - kiba 3y ago
      OK. But the comment I responded to call it a passion/prestige project and contracted it with a normal profit driven business. If you want to just make money, there are far easier and less risky industries you can invest your money in than launch services and rockets. You can even just invest your wealth in an index fund and earn a return that is basically risk-free.
wilg 3y ago
People should really look more at hacking capitalism to do big exciting things, like SpaceX, IMO.
- wrsh07 3y ago
  I completely agree! I think it's generally related to the ai alignment problem, fwiw The trick is that we need to ban fraud aggressively and then reduce the profits from endeavors we want to discourage (not sure if there are good general mechanisms. I mean we use taxes for this sometimes. Imagine if one wanted to reduce the collection of user data if instead of gdpr you created a data tax!) I'm also very interested to hear what projects you think might be good candidates to do this with!
panick21_ 3y ago
For Blue Origin it is true, they are not making money and a privately funded. For SpaceX it just so hilariously wrong. SpaceX did get seed money from Musk, about 90 million. The rest is venture funded just like every other successful company. SpaceX is a very normal capitalist company. Musk has not invested more of his own money into it. SpaceX is making money and raising money to fund future projects. One could maybe make an argument that Musk longer has ambitions to do passion projects, but he has never perused these without building the company in a capitalist way first. Because he knows that if the company isn't successful, non of the long term plans are possible. > not normal capitalist enterprises which are all just about making a buck Every capitalist enterprise has owners, the owners decide what they should do. Often but not always this is 'making a buck'.

Businesses like SpaceX and Blue Origin are really prestige/passion projects, not normal capitalist enterprises which are all just about making a buck.

by kiba 3y ago

Businesses like SpaceX and Blue Origin are really prestige/passion projects, not normal capitalist enterprises which are all just about making a buck.

nordsieck 3y ago

> Businesses like SpaceX and Blue Origin are really prestige/passion projects, not normal capitalist enterprises which are all just about making a buck. Maybe that's true of Blue Origin, but you're going to need a lot more evidence to back up that claim in regards to SpaceX. The best estimate is that they make a >50% gross margin on Falcon 9 launches (at least for external customers). And while they spend a lot on Starlink launches, they're also making quite a lot of Starlink revenue at this point. It's certainly true that they're dumping a lot of R&D money into Starship. But that strategy is how they earned their current medium/heavy lift launch market dominance, so I can't really fault them for that. And if Starship does work out, it could set them up for a functional monopoly on launch for decades. Not to mention dramatically decreasing their internal Starlink costs.

timschmidt 3y ago
With SpaceX, colonizing Mars is the passion / prestige project. Elon and his people are extraordinarily good at finding ways to make all the dependent sub-projects profitable while working toward the larger goal. Which is as impressive as the engineering.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  Mars colonization is not their business. Launching commercial payloads is. Everything else is just marketing.
  - timschmidt 3y ago
    Cynicism like this is tiring. To you, the moon landing must have been just marketing until Neil Armstrong stepped off the last ladder rung, but there was a decade of intense engineering effort leading up to that. You are seeing that intense engineering effort toward a Mars landing now. One does not build the largest and most powerful rocket ever constructed simply to deliver packages.
- soperj 3y ago
  > With SpaceX, colonizing Mars is the passion / prestige project. That's more just a out there goal to motivate people who are motivated by that. Still have had zero launches to Mars.
  - timschmidt 3y ago
    Cynicism like this is tiring. To you, the moon landing must have been just marketing until Neil Armstrong stepped off the last ladder rung, but there was a decade of intense engineering effort leading up to that. You are seeing that intense engineering effort toward a Mars landing now. One does not build the largest and most powerful rocket ever constructed simply to deliver packages.
dotnet00 3y ago
Being a passion project doesn't preclude making a profit. Especially if you're not being stupidly short sighted. Plus, other companies are having a hard enough time competing already (even small launch is facing tough competition from the F9 rideshares), if SpaceX dropped their prices too low, it'd quickly run most of the launch market out of business, which is not in the interests of a company that wants to improve accessibility to space. This is also why even if Starship's cost targets pan out, they'll likely just charge slightly lower than competing options for the specific payload.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > Being a passion project doesn't preclude making a profit. Especially if you're not being stupidly short sighted. OK. But the comment I responded to call it a passion/prestige project and contracted it with a normal profit driven business. > This is also why even if Starship's cost targets pan out, they'll likely just charge slightly lower than competing options for the specific payload. Yeah. SpaceX hasn't said anything, but I tend to believe that they'll move to a capabilities based pricing model where customers pay by the KG and/or m^3. That way they can compete for small payloads while getting paid appropriately for large ones.
  - kiba 3y ago
    OK. But the comment I responded to call it a passion/prestige project and contracted it with a normal profit driven business. If you want to just make money, there are far easier and less risky industries you can invest your money in than launch services and rockets. You can even just invest your wealth in an index fund and earn a return that is basically risk-free.

wilg 3y ago

People should really look more at hacking capitalism to do big exciting things, like SpaceX, IMO.

wrsh07 3y ago
I completely agree! I think it's generally related to the ai alignment problem, fwiw The trick is that we need to ban fraud aggressively and then reduce the profits from endeavors we want to discourage (not sure if there are good general mechanisms. I mean we use taxes for this sometimes. Imagine if one wanted to reduce the collection of user data if instead of gdpr you created a data tax!) I'm also very interested to hear what projects you think might be good candidates to do this with!

panick21_ 3y ago

For Blue Origin it is true, they are not making money and a privately funded. For SpaceX it just so hilariously wrong. SpaceX did get seed money from Musk, about 90 million. The rest is venture funded just like every other successful company. SpaceX is a very normal capitalist company. Musk has not invested more of his own money into it. SpaceX is making money and raising money to fund future projects. One could maybe make an argument that Musk longer has ambitions to do passion projects, but he has never perused these without building the company in a capitalist way first. Because he knows that if the company isn't successful, non of the long term plans are possible. > not normal capitalist enterprises which are all just about making a buck Every capitalist enterprise has owners, the owners decide what they should do. Often but not always this is 'making a buck'.