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SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x.
by indoordin0saur 7mo ago
SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x. They launch, land and re-use their rockets so often now that what was considered impossible 15 years ago is now routine. They currently put more things into space than the rest of the world combined and by a huge margin. They also have the most advanced internet infrastructure in the world and are poised to replace legacy ISPs and even mobile carriers in the coming decade. Oh, and they're doing all this while making a profit ($16B last year) despite their massive R&D spending and even with the money sink that is xAI their profits will be higher this year. It's hard to say that this isn't one of the most innovative and fast moving companies in the world. $1.75T maybe seems excessive, but less so than a lot of other companies out there.
- luke5441 7mo agoI don't see how replacing mobile carriers with space based infrastructure is physically possible.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- tristanj 7mo agoIt's not meant to replace terrestrial networks, it's a space-based alternative that serves areas carriers have no financial incentive to cover. Terrestrial cellular towers cost between $150k to $500k per tower, and are not economically feasible in less populated areas. There are also many dead-zones in mountainous regions, since cell signals are blocked by mountains. Starlink Mobile supplements this, it's simply cheaper for mobile providers to partner with them than do their own buildout. Currently only 5% of the earth's surface is covered by cellular signals. Starlink will push that up to 85+%, and is backward compatible with existing cellphones.
- panick21_ 7mo agoWell if you make the argument that it will replace terrestrial networks and that's why its worth X trillion $ then yes, you do actually need to cover the 1% of earth surface where the waste majority of people actually spend most of their time. The question is not if its a good business, the question if its a 2 trillion $ business, and if you only cover the 95% of earth without coverage. That more like a couple 100 billion $ business at best.
- tristanj 7mo agoI never said it would replace terrestrial networks... you invented that claim yourself and are responding to a strawman. Starlink mobile is for rural areas, and the other 90% of the planet that's not well served by traditional terrestrial networks. And 40% of earth's population live in rural areas, so there is a large market for this kind of service.
- newguytony 7mo agoIn regions like Nigeria or the Philippines, Starlink costs over 100% of the average monthly income. The individual addressable rural market really is closer to 1% than 40%.
- tristanj 7mo agoStarlink Mobile != Starlink You're talking about the wrong product. I am talking about Starlink mobile, their direct-to-cellphone mobile data offering, not Starlink internet...
- newguytony 7mo agoStarlink Mobile actually reinforces my point. Most don't have phones capable of using it. And even at that, it’s a low-bandwidth designed for SMS and emergency data, not a primary ISP replacement. Of course, you can believe what it could be... Much like all of Elons products, they are always coming
- 7mo ago
- triceratops 7mo ago> it's a space-based alternative that serves areas carriers have no financial incentive to cover In a nutshell: they're serving a market that has less money to spend using more expensive tech than the current industry leaders. Maybe I'm wrong but it doesn't scream "massive profit".
- hattmall 7mo agoI think Airplanes are going to be pretty profitable. They are sort of running a market cornering operation there. But, there will be competition eventually. Starlink is way faster than the alternatives so most airlines have switched and Starlink has rapidly increased their prices for aviation. Idk if it's enough though, they are definitely running lots of promos for home customers.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo agoDelta’s ViaSat based Wireless is fine. The latency is hire. But it really isn’t a competitive disadvantage.
- telotortium 7mo agoIf Starlink becomes common enough on flights, I absolutely believe it will be a competitive disadvantage.
- tim-- 7mo ago> Terrestrial cellular towers cost between $150k to $500k per tower I'd be interested to find out exactly where this cost exists. I would expect the majority of the cost (especially in rural/mountainous areas) to be more with power and backhaul, rather than the physical radio gear. Because it's rural, you should be able to easily just use coverage bands (ie 850 MHz or 900 MHz) with relatively high transmission power. This would easily be able to cover 300 km2. Because of the higher transmission power, and the fact that the tower would be in the middle of nowhere, wouldn't the OPEX be higher, with smaller numbers for CAPEX?
- laughing_man 7mo agoA lot of the cost is regulatory. I used to work at a mobile provider, and it took months to get permission from all the various government agencies before we could actually start building. Even if the tower is in BFE, you still have to get all your plots to the FCC, you need EPA signoff for batteries and fuel tanks and such. Plus there's always state and local permits of various kinds. We had a custom workflow application just to track all of that and there were dozens of steps. Cell towers aren't very expensive on an ongoing basis, but every few years you're rolling out the next big technology (we went from analog to 1x to 3g to LTE while I was there) and it's a headache.
- muskstinks 7mo agoEvery city has phone lines. A phone line allows you to replace it with fiber. A fiber and a tower has long loves. A star link server has 5 years. Setting up a terrestrial network is already done and it was relativly easy because you build it up from most profitable to lowest profitable. Star link only serves 9/10 Million people right now with already 10k satelites whith only a lifetime of 5 years and if this market is profitable, the margins will go down sign due to other competitors. Which are already working on it.
- x0x0 7mo agoIt doesn't not seem like anything approaching a lucrative business. TAM: How big is the market for high speed internet that can pay $1200+/year and isn't already well-served by comcast/at&t/etc? And of course, this is all with finite spectrum too. So you can't serve the major cities. No doubt there exist buyers. But rural Montana doesn't have that many households. Add that 5 year replacement cycle and Musk's Trump alignment that has Europe building their own for security reasons.
- ericd 7mo ago> well-served by comcast/at&t/etc These are US telecoms, the satellites blanket the entire Earth at all times. Lower ARPU, but still. Also, it seems like they're swallowing a large percentage of flight/cruise/military internet. And direct-to-cell data coverage of the entire Earth.
- pnw 7mo ago5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) is already part of the 5G standard. It's not a replacement for terrestrial carriers, it's an expansion that enables devices to be always connected and select the appropriate terrestrial vs satellite connection transparently. ~75% of the land mass on Earth has no cell coverage, ~90% if you include the oceans. It's the same transition in theory that we had from landlines to cell towers.
- panick21_ 7mo agoGreat, but the overwhelming majority of money is made from the place people actually live. Those places are called cities. Only about a few % of earth are built on, and even among those the top 1% is where most people live. Don't get me wrong, that fucking great business, but its not 'replacing terrestrial ISP' level great.
- pnw 7mo agoThey said the same thing about cell phones vs landlines back in the day. Based on Starlink's revenue doubling year on year, and a six fold increase since 2022, I don't think anyone really knows what the upper bounds for global access is yet. And traditional telcos are usually limited to a region whereas Starlink is global. Just the top 20 global telcos alone are almost $2 trillion in market cap and $1.35 trillion in revenue. Starlink has captured less than 1% of that revenue to date.
- hattmall 7mo ago>They said the same thing about cell phones vs landlines Did they? I don't really remember that tbh.
- serf 7mo agomy most altruistic view : they said it through actions. Rural areas were the last areas to join the mobile networks. This is just a practical thing though; why would you build a tower for a community of 900 people when there are still gaps in the major metropolitan areas? It can't all happen simultaneously regardless of how badly we wish it could.
- RealityVoid 7mo agoIt has technical merit and it is impressive. But I doubt it's worth that much. I guess Musk has the talent of pushing and getting what he wants, so I guess we'll see how it plays out. I'm just afraid for the future is SpaceX in these crazy crazy times.
- jppope 7mo agothats the game though. Elon is selling a "slice of the future" and everyone starts having FOMO... the result is a P/E ratio of 300 or whatever crazy number. We will all agree that the company isn't worth that, but theres a bunch of people happy to buy meme stocks that will make a ton of money without the slightest idea of how to value stocks. Botton line an asset is worth what people are willing to pay for it.
- projektfu 7mo ago$16B is the top line gross revenue number. You don't count R&D as an expense per GAAP, so... They have claimed $8B in EBITDA, also leaving out the amortization of R&D costs. Those aren't audited numbers, as far as I know.
- pnw 7mo agoAudited financials would be released with the S-1. But it's very unlikely that they are not audited given the amount of money they have raised.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago[flagged]
- projektfu 7mo agoGood to know.
- Xunjin 7mo agoCare to share more about?
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago[flagged]
- jrflowers 7mo agohttps://knowyourmeme.com/memes/source-i-made-it-up https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/source-i-made-it-up
- scuff3d 7mo agoNo related to this conversation, but I just started reading some books on finance and I actually know what most of those terms mean now! Lol
- 7mo ago
- panick21_ 7mo agoSure, but factor of 10 cheaper in a market that is tiny still isn't that much. Even if you assume a 10x market size increase, its still tiny. > They also have the most advanced internet infrastructure in the world and are poised to replace legacy ISPs and even mobile carriers in the coming decade. That's quite the claim. I believe Starlink is a great business, the largest sat business for a long while to come (unlike space datacenter) but even if you are, very, very bullish on it, its not enough to justify the price. You basically need to believe that: - Launch market to 10x and grow faster then it ever has for decades - Starlink goes from already being amazing systematically crushing terrestrial competition. - xAi wins the AI race (this is almost absurdly optimistic) - AI data-center becoming a insanely thing (also absurdly optimistic) And even then this is hard to justify. And I certaintly don't believe 3. or 4. And 1 is a stretch. And while I believe in Starlink continued growth, terrestrial infrastructure still has lots of advantages for cities, where most people actually live.
- le-mark 7mo agoI fully expect Jevons paradox to hold for cheap kg to orbit. Spacex could be the monopoly transportation provider of the Solar Alliance. Yes that’s fanciful, but it illustrates the potential.
- zemvpferreira 7mo agoSo we are now hypothesising fully-developed multi-planetary civilisations to justify an IPO price in 2026? By the same leap of logic Coca-Cola is worth 1 trillion times its current price since it's poised to be the galaxy's drink of choice. And I'm being reasonable with my estimate here, how many galaxies could we actually be talking about in potential?
- le-mark 7mo agoStandard Oil is a ready counter point. The advent of the automobile greatly effected its success. And if one considers the value of children (Exxon, chevron, mobile,etc) after the supreme dissolved it in 1911, it was a tremendous value. One can easily imagine a similar scenario for cheap kg to orbit.
- dawnerd 7mo agoHey are absolutely not replacing “legacy” isps and certainly not mobile. Even if they had perfect coverage, sat signals are way too sensitive to obstructions.
- baby_souffle 7mo agoIf anything they'll go for the lucrative customers that _need_ a signal to go faster through vacuum than through glass. Maybe some decent revenue offering sat to cell for the traditional carriers.
- KeplerBoy 7mo agoThere is no workload that latency sensitive is there? If it is you just move the server where it's needed. I.e. you do HFT next to the stock exchange.
- bKHjNaz23wJ 7mo ago[dead]
- fch42 7mo agoDefinitely not a usecase for Starlink. For the microseconds-chasers, there's microwave relay links, say between Chicago and New York (ref e.g. https://bullseye.ac/blog/economics/inside-the-world-of-high-frequency-trading-infrastructure/ https://bullseye.ac/blog/economics/inside-the-world-of-high-...). Sending a signal up a few hundred km and down again a few hundred km adds way too much latency, and signal-hopping between fast-moving satellites adds way too much jitter for "such applications".
- laughing_man 7mo agoTrue. They're replacing legacy ISPs in areas where your choices are high latency geostationary satellite service, dialup, or DSL where the nearest DSLAM is far enough away that it may as well be dialup.
- rcxdude 7mo ago
- fontain 7mo ago[dead]
- keeda 7mo agoTheir technical accomplishments are doubtlessly notable, but does the expected business growth justify this valuation? Honest question, how many things do we really need to send up there that reducing the cost to orbit by 100x will trigger Jevon's paradox and lead to 100x more launches? I suppose "data centers in space" is the current answer but again, I'm suspicious about its feasibility. Barring that, until we have another "killer app" besides Starlink, like a giant orbital space station or a moonbase, I'm curious whether there is enough demand.
- marcus_holmes 7mo agoPersonally, I think that valuing businesses by their expected growth is doing really bad things to our society. We used to value businesses by their current returns, usually dividends paid to shareholders. And we treated any statements about their future plans as interesting but not something anyone should trust. Now we value stocks on what their price will do in the near future, because the primary return to shareholders is an increase in share price, effectively speculation rather than dividends as the method of returning value to shareholders. So we're incentivising companies to be constantly pushing their share price up (rather than paying decent dividends), which does bad things to both the company and the economy as a whole. It's not how the system was intended to work and we find ourselves on a treadmill of constant growth that is killing everything good.
- kanwisher 7mo agoImagine valuing Google in early 2000s on its revenue and dividends. It would have nearly zero value, but if you bought then you knew it was going to be one of the biggest companies in the world. Only boring stable companies that have no growth like Coca-Cola make sense only valuing without further growth.
- marcus_holmes 7mo agoAgree, but Coca-Cola has plenty of value despite being "boring" and "stable". The post I was replying to was saying that SpaceX had no growth and therefore little value. That's a mindset that sees companies as speculative assets that are only valuable if their price is set to change in a way that a speculative profit can be made. SpaceX is making money and doing well, the business fundamentals are working out, and it is valuable because of that. If it turns into a boring, stable, company then that's a good thing - it's less likely to spend $10B of shareholder funds chasing some sci-fi pipe dream (instead of, say, spending $1B testing its assumptions first) in the hope of continuing to be valued as a "high-growth" stock.
- themafia 7mo agoThe difference between an Arianne and SpaceX launch is 10%, not 10x.
- andreime 7mo agomuskians will never use real math
- fidelramos 7mo agoIs that accounting for SpaceX stages being reusable? Honest question.
- MPSimmons 7mo agoDifference in cost per launch, cost per mass, or payload capacity?
- 7e 7mo ago[flagged]
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 7mo ago[flagged]
- mbix77 7mo agoAll your comments are about Elon Musk. Weird.
- Valakas_ 7mo agoIn a world where it's trendy to hate on Musk, it's good there are people that provide some balance.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- sham1 7mo agoDoesn't this idea presume that the hate that Elon gets isn't totally justified?
- mlrtime 7mo agoSo nobody is entitled to a thought that is against the hive mind here? I think it's worse than what you're saying. It's almost impossible to have an objective discussion on any technology he touches in a online forum without someone mentioning his behaviors. Godwins law.
- sham1 7mo agoWell I don't know about you, but I at least think that it's good that the "hive mind" questions people who don't hate neo-nazis. Because that tends to be a warning sign when it comes to many other nasty opinions one might hold. And I'll just pre-empt any argument about how Elon is not a neo-nazi because that gesture he did on that stage wasn't a Hitler salute or whatever, I'd suggest any potential person wanting to argue that to save their breath. Or whatever other arguments one can possibly come up with to excuse some of the statements and actions of Elon. As for an objective discussion about the tech he's involved with, he has objectively ruined any good reputation and potential goodwill people had for... what exactly? It's fine if all you (impersonal) want to do is talk about how cool SpaceX's rockers and whatnot are, but one shouldn't be surprised if others get uneasy due to the entity behind said rockets or that they wish to discuss that. To complete the Godwin quota, it's like trying to have an "objective discussion" about the V2 rocket while ignoring that those rockets were built by the quite literal Nazis for their war capacity. And that some of the scientists and engineers working on said project, built by slave labour, ended up in America and the USSR due to operations Paperclip and Osoaviakhim respectively.
- shafyy 7mo agoThe jury is still out on Starship. And also a bold claim to say that SpaceX by itself has reduced the cost of a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10. Did it play an important role in that reduction? Sure...
- danw1979 7mo agoWho else “played a role” in Falcon 9 reducing the cost of mass to orbit, exactly ? I guess some public money went their way ? Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ? The achievements of the program so far and the infrastructure currently under construction in Starbase and the cape are seriously impressive. This is no speculative, skunkworks endeavour.
- shafyy 7mo agoYes the jury is out on this: > Also which jury is still out on starship ? I haven’t read any serious criticism that suggests there are insurmountable technical obstacles to it working. Timelines and the exact final cost-to-orbit are still debatable I guess ? There are also other space companies outside of SpaceX who have innovated and reduced the cost of mass to orbit. Just trying to add the perspective that while yes, SpaceX is impressive, there are also other companies and this hero-like worship of SpaceX (or any other company/person) is not great.
- le-mark 7mo ago> There are also other space companies outside of SpaceX who have innovated and reduced the cost of mass to orbit. They should be easy to name then. I can’t think of any. Can you?
- DennisP 7mo agoSo far everybody's playing catch-up, but there are some innovative rocket companies out there. Blue Origin is finally getting to orbit with partial reusability, Rocket Lab and Relativity Space are doing some cool stuff, and Stoke Space is working on full reusability, evaporative cooling for reentry (using hydrogen fuel for the second stage, which works much better for this than methane), can steer for landing without gimbaling the engines, and has a full flow staged combustion engine like Starship.
- johnbarron 7mo agoThis comment reads like an S-1 pitch deck and almost every claim is false or misleading. The $16B is not profit its revenue, and I strongly suggest to learn the difference before investing. The $8B figure is EBITDA, also known as, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, AND amortization. For a company running around 9500 LEO satellites with a less than 5 year lifespan, depreciation is the business. Their FCC filings show that about 500 satellites deorbited just in the first of half of 2025 alone, and they were all under 5 years old. The estimates for constellation sustenance are currently at $5-8B per year in satellite manufacturing (about $500K each) and launch costs are about $3M each. That is the real capex that EBITDA hides. Net income has never been disclosed and probably for good reason... And lets not even mention the $19 billion EchoStar acquisition who is almost certainly! not included in the $8 billion EBITDA figures reported... The most critical is that xAI is excluded from the number. XAI had a $1.46B net loss in Q3 2025 on just $107M in revenue, accelerating from $1B the prior quarter. They were burning $1B a month at the time of filing. This pig was then merged into SpaceX in Feb 2026 along with X/Twitter. So start with $8B EBITDA, subtract $5-8B satellite replacement, subtract $4-6B per year in xAI losses, subtract interest and taxes specially amortization and you are very very deep in the red. Once audited financials go public, every analyst with a calculator and a working brain will see this. Also the revenue is largely circular... Over 70% of Falcon 9 launches in 2025 were internal Starlink missions so SpaceX is its own biggest customer. Starlink is 70% of total revenue. The so called "launch business" and "internet business" are the same capital cycle booked as two revenue lines ;-) Replace legacy ISPs? Really? Starlink has 0.2% residential market share after 5 years, with declining ARPU ($85 avg vs $120 US) and congestion already emerging at 10M subs. It is a niche rural/maritime ISP, not an AT&T killer. And on the valuation? NVIDIA for example, who has an almost actual monopoly on AI chips, with $216B revenue, and $120B net income, at 56% margins, trades at 20x revenue. Tesla…. already considered absurdly overvalued at P/E 355, trades at 15x. Amazon at 3x. Meta at 10x. SpaceX wants 110x !! times revenue, with no audited financials, unknown net income, and a freshly absorbed money losing AI company. Even on bullish 2026 projected revenue of $24B, it's 73x so nearly 4x NVIDIA multiple, and NVIDIA actually prints profit... Starship on another side is very very far from routine... 11 flights, 5 failures. But notice on thing...In 2025 alone on Flight 7 the upper stage exploded from harmonic vibrations. Then Flight 8 exploded from propellant mixing. Flight 9 was destroyed on reentry...Ship 36 exploded on test stand ...the first V3 booster exploded during pressure testing and was scrapped. See a pattern here? Each failure from a different root cause. So multiple unsolved failure modes, not iteration. It has never reached orbit, never caught a ship, never demonstrated orbital refueling. This offering is the most scandalous ever and the structure tells you everything. The filing is confidential, REAL financials only need to go public 15 days before the roadshow. Nasdaq is literally changing its index rules effective May 1 to allow a fast track Nasdaq-100 entry in 15 trading days. This is a rule that never existed before, and is made for this IPO, forcing billions in passive index buying on day one. Public float is just 3% to 4%. This is one of the tightest floats for any major US IPO in modern history, and I have been following the markets for 20 years. They do 30% retail allocation what is three times the norm and tells you exactly who the target buyer is. Given this level of rule bending, dont be shocked if the S-1 with real audited numbers quietly drops at the last legally permissible moment, maybe minutes before the IPO? ensuring hype and retail commitments are fully baked, before anyone really looks at what the financials actually say. It will be a wildly successful IPO. Same playbook as Tesla 2010, just with more zeros and fewer functioning prototypes.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoAt some point we'll reach saturation of what we're comfortable putting into LEO, or at least greater pushback from governments leading to regulations in hopes of avoiding that. There's a lot of space junk out there already and they're still pumping out those isp satellites en mass. Luckily these specific spacex LEO sats decay pretty rapidly (unless they've made them more advanced recently, I haven't followed closely as of late.) So I guess they'll keep themselves busy at least refreshing the fleet.
- conception 7mo agoYes humanity has a great track record of taking care of the commons.
- simondotau 7mo agoLEO is like a bad haircut. Just wait a while and the disaster solves itself.
- indoordin0saur 7mo agoThey decay out of orbit by design
- conception 7mo agoSure over potentially 25 years+.