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Space lift is not very profitable. The money comes from whatever you actually put in orbit with that lift capacity.

by verzali 3mo ago

adastra22 3mo ago
SpaceX’s launch services have huge margins.
- ben_w 3mo ago
  Huge 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 3mo ago
    This 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
        Can’t rule out hyperinflation doing some heavy lifting :)
        ben_w 3mo ago
        Yeah, indeed, I was assuming in constant today-dollars. :)
      - rithdmc 3mo ago
        In which currency? 1 billion Rupiah is less than 60,000 usd ;) A quadrillionaire would only need $60 billion or so.
      - adastra22 3mo 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. 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
  Demand 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.

Space lift is not very profitable. The money comes from whatever you actually put in orbit with that lift capacity.

by verzali 3mo ago

Space lift is not very profitable. The money comes from whatever you actually put in orbit with that lift capacity.

adastra22 3mo ago

SpaceX’s launch services have huge margins.

ben_w 3mo ago
Huge 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 3mo ago
  This 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
      Can’t rule out hyperinflation doing some heavy lifting :)
      - ben_w 3mo ago
        Yeah, indeed, I was assuming in constant today-dollars. :)
    - rithdmc 3mo ago
      In which currency? 1 billion Rupiah is less than 60,000 usd ;) A quadrillionaire would only need $60 billion or so.
    - adastra22 3mo 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. 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 3mo 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 3mo ago
Demand 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.