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That feels…low. They’re the only one with significant proven and operational space lift capacity
by Havoc 4mo ago
That feels…low. They’re the only one with significant proven and operational space lift capacity
- verzali 4mo agoSpace lift is not very profitable. The money comes from whatever you actually put in orbit with that lift capacity.
- adastra22 4mo agoSpaceX’s launch services have huge margins.
- ben_w 4mo agoHuge negative margins, according to the article: "Starting with the reusable rockets, MS expects SpaceX to eat itself. Launch costs will collapse by more than 99 per cent versus their historical average within 10 years, it says. Operating margin on launches will have jumped to about 40 per cent, from around negative 50 per cent currently, but 40 per cent of less than 1 per cent still isn’t very much." Though as someone (probably JumpCrisscross, can't remember) pointed out a previous time this came up, as SpaceX is selling launch to Starlink, and also own Starlink, which one of the two gets to count as making a profit or a loss is just a matter of preference.
- adastra22 4mo agoThis is my industry I know it well, apparently much better than these bozos. SpaceX launch is only “unprofitable” only in the accounting sense because they reinvest their profits into Starship. Their actual profit margin for launch of F9 is 62% - 80% depending on configuration. That is a margin unheard of in aerospace. There is literally no competition worth speaking of, and nobody to provide downward price pressure. SpaceX started moving into their own constellations because lower prices open up new markets, and this lets them access those markets without having to lower launch prices. And if you think, as Morgan Stanley seems to, that the only money to be made in space is selling launch of earth orbiting satellites, you’re going to miss out on the boom that is going to make the first quadrillionaire.
- ben_w 4mo ago> And if you think, as Morgan Stanley seems to, that the only money to be made in space is selling launch of earth orbiting satellites, you’re going to miss out on the boom that is going to make the first quadrillionaire. I was with you up to this point. Quadrillionaire? Seriously? On species-wide economy of 0.1Q/year? On a timescale short enough that SpaceX remains a coherent entity and you don't have to account for things like the sum-total risk of nuclear war? Or even just of Musk dying of old age given he's 55?
- aczerepinski 4mo agoCan’t rule out hyperinflation doing some heavy lifting :)
- ben_w 4mo agoYeah, indeed, I was assuming in constant today-dollars. :)
- rithdmc 4mo agoIn which currency? 1 billion Rupiah is less than 60,000 usd ;) A quadrillionaire would only need $60 billion or so.
- adastra22 4mo agoThe material wealth of the Earth is only a small, small fraction of the accessible material in the inner solar system, let alone the universe. Starship fundamentally changes the game in ways people aren’t paying attention to because it pattern matches to sci-fi. But the economics are real: power and material far beyond what is available on Earth, on many cases at lower marginal price than terrestrial sources, and 1000x to 100000x reserves.
- ben_w 4mo ago> The material wealth of the Earth is only a small, small fraction of the accessible material in the inner solar system, let alone the universe. And you think you can access that in 30 years? That's the problem here. Market valuations for, say, the USA, do not count the entire value of the nickel and iron down to the planet's core. > Starship fundamentally changes the game in ways people aren’t paying attention to because it pattern matches to sci-fi. But the economics are real: power and material far beyond what is available on Earth, on many cases at lower marginal price than terrestrial sources, and 1000x to 100000x reserves. No, it doesn't. I've done the maths here. At best, and with a better track record than Musk has actually demonstrated, if we use the USA as a metaphor for a the K2 civilisation Musk talks about with lunar-tiling factories making nothing but data centre satellites (done the maths on that too, that's what it would take and even then be borderline on thermodynamics grounds), Starship can be the Mayflower. Not even the Oregon Trail, certainly not the railroad network. And fundamentally it isn't coherent to talk about "lower marginal price" when space mining has a TRL of 1 or 2. Might be cheap eventually, but pricing that in right now would be an error of judgment (aside from anything else, the tech to make it cheap may also make stuff here cheaper). The only way this happens in my lifetime, and I'm younger than Musk, is if someone solves for von Neumann replicators. Which I won't rule out, but Musk hasn't demonstrated any special sauce for this to make me think he'd do it before anyone else.
- verzali 4mo agoDemand is low. Remove Starlink and look how often they launch. And look at how it has changed over the years. There's a reason they went so hard into Starlink.
- JPLeRouzic 4mo agoCitation: "Morgan Stanley’s sum-of-the-parts analysis tells a more nuanced story. The “Space” segment, which encompasses Falcon rockets, Dragon capsules, and the Starship program, has been bleeding money. Heavy investment in Starship development drove operating losses in that division, even as SpaceX overall reported a profit of around $8 billion on revenues between $15 and $16 billion in 2025"
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoThey're treating lift as a cost centre for the $128/share connectivity segment. (X and Grok being worth $12/share is debatable. Enterprise AI being worth $150+ speaks for itself as nonsense.)
- laughing_man 4mo agoStarship is going to be huge when it's finally operational. It seems like it should be worth more than $8/shr if the potential is accounted properly.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4mo ago> Starship is going to be huge when it's finally operational. Any day now. Yep, real soon, honest!
- jve 4mo agoDon't repeat mistakes of people that were making fun of SpaceX landing rockets before they started to land. Starship has so much innovation in there, the raptors itself etc. It launches, it flies, it re-enters and it lands. The engines work. The heat protection work. Even when they push it to the limits by intentionally experimenting with different heat protection, omitting tiles etc. Even when they are in R&D stage. I believe they can make it work with little refurbishment between flights. Even if all didn't work like they planned, they still have a very, very good vehicle. I mean something must go off the rails very very badly for the Starship NOT to enter the service.
- yborg 4mo agoIt has to make money. The Space Shuttle was a technical marvel as well and was massively subsidized by the US taxpayer.
- __d 4mo agoFalcon9 has basically no market: the only thing that keeps it flying is Starlink. The whole AI/orbital datacentres/launch thing is a giant grift.
- laughing_man 4mo agoFalcon 9 has easily enough market launching commercial satellites to keep it flying outside of Starlink. It's the most efficient launcher in the world from a cost perspective. Falcon 9 was making money before Starlink existed.
- XorNot 4mo agoThere just isn't that much demand for space. Space is cool to nerds like me, but what do I really need from it? I've got all the navigation satellites I could want (which I don't pay for) and the best satellite imagery I use is still hyperspectral airborne imagery. Now, of course that's not the full story but the use cases get rather specific beyond that: the launch market just isn't actually very big (afaik $30 billion a year).
- zpeti 4mo agoWithout doing a google search - optical fibers factories and pharma factories can deliver higher quality products when built in space. And I bet there are hundreds of other examples. Just because launch costs were high and these weren't viable before, doesn't mean they won't be viable now.
- antonvs 4mo ago> optical fibers factories and pharma factories can deliver higher quality products when built in space Those seem like classic examples of what you get when you have a solution in search of problems. What’s the monetary value of the incremental improvements in those products, and how does it compare to the cost of setting up and operating manufacturing facilities in orbit?
- saalweachter 4mo agoAnd what could you get quality-wise if you poured an equivalent amount of money into improving ground based factories?
- XorNot 4mo agoFiber optic are currently so cheap that they are being used in expendable, single use applications in the Russia/Ukraine war in spools of 50+km. You're talking about achieving highly marginal gains in product quality at the expense of having to launch into space literally every single part of the production process and recover it from space. Which includes things like "ruggedizing what you launch so it can survive the launch" and "also ruggedizing it to survive the landing".
- agentcoops 4mo agoIn finance and so the world we live in, the value of an equity is less related to the merit of the product than the firm's capacity to generate future free cash flow. Software companies, B2B SaaS in particular, have been basically unbeatable in this regard, hence the state of the market (and our salaries) for the past few decades. Industrial firms have to use metrics like "EBITDA" to show how much cash they'd have to potentially pay to investors if they didn't have to pay so much in interest on their debt, taxes, and fixing up decaying equipment...
- rsynnott 4mo agoBut it doesn't make any _money_. Approximately all the ballpoint pens in the world are dependent on a single company, Mikron Group. It has a market capitalisation of about CHF 275.5 million. "We're the only ones who do that" is insufficient; it has to make money. And honestly, generally, "we're the only ones who do that" is a strong sign that a thing doesn't really make much money; if it did, well, other people would do it.