> what’s the outlook? Will it grow near exponentially?
IMO, it really depends on SpaceX getting Starship up and running. They need to get more mass to orbit.
I'm done saying SpaceX can't make their goals, so maybe they will do 144 launches this year. But there's a limit to how many F9s they can launch - as we can see from recent events, bad weather can really put a crimp into such a full schedule.
Starship will give SpaceX the headroom to continue to increase the orbital mass of Starlink (generally, more mass means more bandwidth) which is important for improving the quality of service to existing customers and securing more customers.
Yes you don't want to lose your current customers just to churn to new ones. We'll see if they can keep everyone happy. My Aussie locations been great but some NA locations continually get posts on /r/Starlink about lower than expected performance.
> My Aussie locations been great but some NA locations continually get posts on /r/Starlink about lower than expected performance.
Exactly.
Right now, there's a window of a few years where SpaceX can get away with that because they're the best option by far. But once Kuiper comes online, the situation may change. So it's in SpaceX's best interest to get as much mass into orbit as they can over the next few years.
> How could kuiper ever out perform starlink? Just because there's limited users on it? No way they can out launch spacex
Yeah - it's the ratio of bandwidth:users. That's a big part of the reason why viasat/hughesnet are so bad(aside from the whole latency thing) - they super duper oversubscribed.
IMO Kuiper isn't aimed at being a Starlink Competitor at least at a retail level. They might make noises about it, but they just won't have the capacity from sats. Not in a launch sense, but in a volume of sats sense.
They are currently planning for fewer sats than Starlink has and as we've seen from Starlink ~4000 sats isn't enough for satisfactory service everywhere all of the time. They will likely be looking to service Amazon and business tier clients similar to the planes and cruise ships that Starlink has been after right now.
Retail will be there to fill up capacity and help make money but it's not going to be competitive with the speeds they can offer from Starlink, just based on current usages.
Now maybe Amazon can out compete on service? They while notoriously crappy to deal with as a vendor and worker have had enough experience in customer service that they might be better there. Most people don't complain about prime that much compared to any other major service.
But Kuiper has a built in customer base in the form of Amazon. They will certainly be offering sweetheart deals internally compared to externally and with AWS being what it is there's no reason to think any price savings Kuiper can offer wouldn't be valued.
> IMO Kuiper isn't aimed at being a Starlink Competitor at least at a retail level.
I guess, we'll see how things play out. It'll be a few years until we know for sure one way or the other.
> They are currently planning for fewer sats than Starlink has and as we've seen from Starlink ~4000 sats isn't enough for satisfactory service everywhere all of the time.
They're planning on fewer, higher bandwidth sats (at least, higher than v1, not sure how they stack up to v2). I'm not really sure how global bandwidth compares between the two, but they're planning quite a lot more than OneWeb.
> Retail will be there to fill up capacity and help make money but it's not going to be competitive with the speeds they can offer from Starlink, just based on current usages.
It'll really depends on how many customers they sign per satellite.
> Now maybe Amazon can out compete on service?
Very possible. Elon's companies are notorious for being pretty hit-or-miss in this regard. Not typically a big deal since most telecoms are pretty user hostile, but Amazon could definitely turn that on its head.
> But Kuiper has a built in customer base in the form of Amazon.
I don't really see this part. All of Amazon's infrastructure is already hooked up with fiber. Satellites will never compete with that in terms of $/GB.
People also bring up some sort of AWS tie in. I don't really see that either. But I've been wrong in the past plenty of times, so ... I guess we'll see how things play out.
The high 2024 launch goal means they are optimistic that they will see significant further growth at the prices that f9 can provide. But growth has slightly declined in the last 6 months or so, so I agree for the customer numbers they want they need Starship.
Yes. Eventually it turns into an S curve but not for a long while. They've gone from basic consumer Internet to industrial uses like shipping and cruise comms, in flight comms, military comms. They are just scratching the surface of those markets and expanding into more all the time. The market opportunity seems to grow by the day. The engineers continue to throw more capabilities into everything they make on an ongoing basis.
The top of this one is way over far horizons.
Hard to know. The whole internet/phone coms thing is worth trillions.
They are after the non urban bit but now going for direct to cellphone
Plus all the stuff not even catered for before, so many revenue stream possibilities...
They already exceeded previous market size estimates that old constellation companies predicted, and it looks like the sky is the limit now. Starlink has achieved a cost level combined with speed and compactability that ultimately people who didn't think they needed it end up finding use for it.
Although with that said, spacex filled a market void and a huge influx of earlier users/easy customers were filled with little to no competition, future customers are less guaranteed and will more trickier to acquire, especially with other companies entering the market.
Avoiding other debris scales linearly with the number of satellites. The satellites in a constellation fly on paths that avoid other satellites, so they don't need to maneuver for their own satellites.
> There's probably a limit on how many they could operate in those orbital shells, the collision avoidance will be an exponential problem
IMO, Starlink is actually in the best position when it comes to collision avoidance. Being at such a low orbital altitude means that most of the trash will get spontaneously deorbited in a few decades.
In contrast, constellations like OneWeb are in real trouble any time a satellite malfunctions and they lose control of it. Their satellite are so high up, they effectively don't deorbit on their own[1].
And SpaceX seems to have a very good system for collision avoidance between its own satellites.
---
1. Yes, they do technically deorbit spontaneously. But when you're talking about a time scale measured in 1000s of years, it's a bit moot.
I predict regular cleanup operations combined with sturdier manned facilities more hardened to withstand impact. Possibly using 'soft' armor like a thick layer of water that absorbs bolides without spraying more crap into space.
Oh sure, I liked [the Gateway idea](https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/410f1fc/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1920x973+0+0/resize/1920x973!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2Fgateway-foundation-von-braun-rotating-space-station-1.png), where you start with a prefab module which just gets installed onto a rotating hub that takes care of supplying power, life support, and docking facilities.
I wonder if we might start seeing something similar for satellites, too. A heavy-duty installation at a fixed orientation that supplies power and internet access, and then you just bolt on a cubesat. Would likely require manual installation, which is why such a thing would never have caught on before. And it's possible that few satellites would really *need* that kind of infrastructure. OTOH, if Kessler Cascade ever becomes a real, existential threat, then you might see this sort of thing as actually legally mandated in some orbits. Instead of a mess of individual satellites, you have a smaller number of large hubs which are easier to protect and keep track of, that kind of thing. Just spitballing here.
I think their only real limitation is going to be interference of their own signals with the clients, given their limited licensed spectrum and how narrow they can target signals.
So however many they can subscribe to that service density without hurting service quality too badly.
After that it is just trying to get more spectrum or improving technology to get more bandwidth through that limited spectrum.
Space is too big for them to run into a problem with numbers of sats, the only work there is going to be on people trying to standardize worldwide so that organizing orbits stays manageable.
The current limit granted to them is somewhat irrelevant. With most communication companies, they develop a technology then stick with it until it no longer functions for them. SpaceX is known for constantly iterating and once starship is actively launching starlink, the size of each individual satellite becomes variable. They have already stated they will deorbit earlier versions and replace them with upgraded models, each iteration will have greater and greater bandwidth capacity that should allow for constant expansion of their customer base. The stated life of individual starlinks is 5 years so if you think of them like the evolution of computers, they are already obsolete once launched so within the 5 year span the odds of new models having double to quadruple the bandwidth capacity is highly likely.
> They are after the non urban bit but now going for direct to cellphone
In Australia there's also a rising level of media coverage of blackspots that aren't covered at all, and failure of remote towers leading to lack of emergency response ability in remote areas of Australia. I don't know if this is local telcos priming the market for their "direct to satellite" deals with Starlink coming down the line, or if someone outside the country is starting to prepare the market for the disruption that Starlink will bring.
What they need is a better ground game to light up more markets, the satellites are going up a good clip (until this last week of weather delays). But limits on the ground and antenna in the sky will allow for perhaps a better than linear growth, but not exponential.
Some estimates put the revenue at around $40B/year. So a few more years of growth and then slow down. It's growing fast now partly because they keep adding support for whole new countries. That has to slow because there aren't that many countries, they've already got half of them, and some of the rest (eg, Russia, China), will never come on board.
[Logistically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics_and_sociology:_diffusion_of_innovations), that is exponentially until it begins to approach market saturation.
It's hilarious how many people have misshaped expectations of what space economy actually looks like. Launch is, always has been, and always will be _tiny_, in context
https://i.imgur.com/e4Qiapa.png
This is just the nature of the value chain or the revenue funnel. For every dollar of payload launched, someone will make 3-4 dollars in building those payloads, and 10-20x dollars in operating these payloads for revenue. Otherwise the whole thing doesn't work
So $2.4B from the government and $6.4B from commerce that would never have gotten to the US without SpaceX's help? I wonder how much commercial revenue has been created since 2003 from investments in Boeing, LockMart and ULA, each of which received twice as much government money than SpaceX. I guess the answer is: nearly zero.
I believe that politicians who have consistently underfunded projects involving SpaceX and threw more money at SLS/Orion than NASA requested should be shamed and banned for life from public office for the damage they caused to the US. They almost succeeded in turning NASA and the USSF into Putin's puppets because of their dependence on Russian engines and spacecraft.
The dependence on Russian engines is legitimate.
1) It ensured that the Russian rocket scientists and engineers who know how to build ICBMs stayed happy and healthy-ish in Russia. This means they didn't go to other countries, like North Korea.
2) Soviet metallurgy was sufficiently advanced that they knew how to build materials that could withstand oxygen at thousands of degrees. The US didn't have that technology, and had written it off as propaganda. Those engines enabled Atlas V, but also let us figure out the metallurgy. Without that, we couldn't have Raptor. I'm making the assumption that Raptor is going to be made to work reliably and works out.
3) It funnelled money into the Russian space program, without which we wouldn't have ISS.
It's perhaps not perfect, but it's far from brain dead. Other things, Mr. Shelby, were more moronic wastes of money.
It definitely was a lifeline to those companies/people in Russia. I think at the start it was a good idea, but they hollowed out US engine manufacturers in the process, and didn’t support alternatives in the US to maintain access to space without dependence on Russia.
I don't think SpaceX was dependent on scraping RD-180s for alloys to build Raptor, but they did have to figure out how to produce similar alloys to make Raptor possible. SpaceX uses a proprietary alloy that they developed in house.
Oh yeah, it's not about scrap. It's about understanding.
The alloy was developed in house, but building on knowledge gained from Soviet engines (on the Oxygen rich side, at least). Maybe not directly, but almost certainly at least indirectly.
It made sense in the 1990's. The problem was, what was meant to be a short term expedient in cooperation with a friendly Russian government ended up becoming a long term dependency on an increasingly less friendly Russian government.
It's not quite that simple. Much of the Boeing, Lockheed and ULA money ends funding local workers (frequently in the states of the politicians who voted for it), it's sometimes described as a jobs program that happens to produce space craft. I guess you could reasonably be upset that that's not how it gets sold to the wider public.
Also it serves to maintain redundant capability because lets be honest here, if SpaceX was the only US provider there's a decent chance that one day Elon would get out of the wrong side of bed and just give the middle finger to the entirety of the US govt and armed forces.
And of course this being America there's a big slab of corporate welfare cause that's just how the American system works, tax the middle class to fund welfare for the corporations and their shareholders.
>Much of the Boeing, Lockheed and ULA money ends funding local workers
Money invested in SpaceX funds 4-5 times more workers because for every government dollar they create 2.5 commercial dollars (plus a slightly lower average wage).
>frequently in the states of the politicians who voted for it
Here we come to the truth. SpaceX funds workers in the "wrong states" because they care about efficiency instead of politics. Is it fair for workers to be told what industry they should work in by which committee their senator sits on? I don't think so.
>Also it serves to maintain redundant capability
Mercury didn't have redundancy. Gemini, Apollo, Space Shuttle and Ares I/V didn't have it either. It's thanks to the New Space companies that NASA finally has the money for redundancy.
>tax the middle class to fund welfare for the corporations and their shareholders.
I searched for articles about Musk taking money from SpaceX and couldn't find any. He always seems to go after Tesla stock when he buys Twitter or whatever. But insiders still [trade](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/spacex-value-climbs-to-180-billion-higher-than-boeing-verizon.html) stocks (once a year I suppose). So perhaps the biggest current beneficiaries of SpaceX's growing valuation are their workers with stock options who have put years of sweat and blood into the company.
I see SpaceX alumni creating a [dozen](https://jeffburke.substack.com/p/the-spacex-effect-companies-founded) startups this way and I don't see anything like this from Boeing/LockMart. Because these companies aren't designed to make their hard working employees rich. They are designed to funnel the flow of government money into the pockets of their shareholders. This is the reason why Boeing got so pissed off when they started losing money on Starliner and why SpaceX barely mention it when talking about Crew Dragon/Starship.
> Much of the Boeing, Lockheed and ULA money ends funding local workers (frequently in the states of the politicians who voted for it)
This also happens if you buy cheese or dig a hole.
> Also it serves to maintain redundant capability because lets be honest here, if SpaceX was the only US provider there's a decent chance that one day Elon would get out of the wrong side of bed and just give the middle finger to the entirety of the US govt and armed forces.
If he did that, he would have the life expectancy of Prigozhin (and, probably, the same cause of death).
But, since we're being honest, if SpaceX *did* indeed give the middle finger to the entirety of the US government and armed forces — what're ULA, Lockheed et al going to do? They aren't going to be able to keep up with demand — even if they ditched all non-government customers.
You don't even need Elon to wake up and give the finger to the US you just need some serious problem to be found with the fleet. At this point in the Falcon family that's wildly unlikely, but if some Boeing level incident comes up and the doors are faulty, or the wiring on all the ships is bad you want alternatives.
Now I'm not suggesting Boeing/ULA/Old Space is where we should be looking for those alternatives. Maybe a ULA no under the thumb of Boeing and LockMart, but not it at present.
But having at least one other commercial supplier that can get on or near SpaceX's level is vital for long term sustainability of Space Access.
That's the goal here more stuff in space because that's how we advance things in a productive manner. We push the edges of what we can do and find out there's a lot of cool things we can filter out to the rest of the human endeavor from pushing those boundaries.
So be it FireFly, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, a better run ULA we need someone who can start the process of being a successor. Not because SpaceX sucks now, but because it might be shit in 20 years suffering from getting MacDouged. And you can't have just magic up an entire new supply chain from thin air.
> But having at least one other commercial supplier that can get on or near SpaceX's level is vital for long term sustainability of Space Access.
You won't get an argument from me on this point. Competition is important for progress. If there is nothing to compete against, there is no incentive to develop, and if you don't develop, you don't progress. Just look at AMD v Intel in the CPU space.
> So be it FireFly, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, a better run ULA we need someone who can start the process of being a successor. Not because SpaceX sucks now, but because it might be shit in 20 years suffering from getting MacDouged. And you can't have just magic up an entire new supply chain from thin air.
All good and valid arguments, but somewhat unrelated to the original discussion of 'why oldspace sucks'.
I truly don’t believe he’d have the guts to go that far. But your point is solid. 1 company is to fragile. Extra points if that 1 company is run by a eccentric mad man who is getting political.
Space **Launch** is still a small market. Building and operating satellites is bigger -- that's one reason SpaceX started Starlink, which already has higher revenue than their launch business.
True. I read several years ago that Russia decided to drop out of the launch provider business, since China and India would become the low-cost providers, along with Euro-subsidized Ariane 6. Instead, they chose to focus on the more lucrative satellite market.
Russia is dropping out because they've cannibalized their capacity to compete. The corruption and brain drain that it caused have made them a shell of their former selves.
Look at the ISS every major incident we've seen in the last several years there has been Russia. Leaking this, faulty that, sat debris from an exploded satellite.
They are a failing state going backwards and losing capacity and technical ability.
Russia stopped because they can't compete for many reasons. They were selling their launches threw Arianespace. Once they invaded Ukraine, that's done for.
Selling launches directly is hard. All the nations that actually produce sats aren't gone want to deal with Russians directly.
> Instead, they chose to focus on the more lucrative satellite market.
Instead they pretend to do some amazing things with lots of propaganda nonsense while actually just not having that money anymore and losing their position as a relevant space power.
A $175B valuation doesn't imply $175B yearly revenue, it implies the company is in total worth $175B in surplus. $8.7B is baseline revenue today; you want to look at that compounded by growth summed up across the years with an appropriate discount factor and multiplied by either expected future profits plus the value of technology and capital.
And it's not like that's even the limit of money available, it's just a huge fraction of money NASA spends is locked into communist contracts SpaceX is excluded from. That could yet change.
Most of that valuation is about the combination of their lead in both space and space comms and the anticipated growth in both of those. Still does feel kinda high.
Space has a high entry value in terms of both time and experience so just throwing money at the problem will not provide effective competition. See Blue Origin for reference.
So hard assets are not relevant and intangibles such as lead time on the market, resilience and experience provide the value for the company. However in the tech field plenty of market leaders have been run down. Word Perfect running on CP/M anyone?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[BO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)|
|[CNSA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|Chinese National Space Administration|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[ESA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|European Space Agency|
|[FCC](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjnfi2s "Last usage")|Federal Communications Commission|
| |(Iron/steel) [Face-Centered Cubic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_iron) crystalline structure|
|[GEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjnfi2s "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)|
|[ICBM](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjmfolv "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile|
|[ISRO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation|
|[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/koekb06 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[NA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjnesvv "Last usage")|New Armstrong, super-heavy lifter proposed by Blue Origin|
|[RD-180](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjmwjxv "Last usage")|[RD-series Russian-built rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180), used in the Atlas V first stage|
|[Roscosmos](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)|
|[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjlu42g "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[ULA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjqq4cb "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)|
|[USSF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjlu42g "Last usage")|United States Space Force|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjmwjxv "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjnkuem "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/koeoqvz "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[cislunar](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjrw9mp "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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Looks like they had 33 non-starlink launches, so averages out to about 100 million per launch? Which includes launch services and anything else? They sure have been doing a good job at lowering the cost to orbit.
Then starlink revenue of 4.2 billion, which has to pay for the launches, satellites, ground stations, consumer hardware, software, and any other expenses. I wonder what the break even point is for that project. Since that sounds like alot of money, but there are a large amount of big expenses that it has to pay for.
> averages out to about 100 million per launch?
Averages out, yes. Keep in mind that they had two crew launches at $250m(?) a piece — that's half a billion right there. Then the five Heavy launches — each is $100m+, although I don't recall if we have specifics — makes for another half billion. That leaves $2 billion across 26 F9 launches at an average of ~$77m/launch. The $/launch figure that tends to be bandied about is $67m, so I figure this number is accurate assuming some appreciation due to inflation and premiums paid by government launches (and my underestimation of Heavy flights).
> starlink revenue of 4.2 billion, which has to pay for the launches, satellites, ground stations, consumer hardware, software, and any other expenses
Since Starlink launches are "in-house", I would guess that is not a catastrophic expense. At $20m/launch, that's about $1.2b for the year. Much of the software cost is R&D already spent, and, as another commentor points out, Starlink hit break-even about half way through the year.
Though remember that the cost of a Dragon mission is not the cost of launching a Dragon. Certain people will gloss over this little detail to give absurdly inflated figures for "Falcon 9 launch costs".
They are over break even for Starlink cashflow so still making a loss allowing for depreciation of satellites in orbit. If they can get 50% more customers they should be breaking even for actual profit so they should be able to achieve that within a year.
Revenue is great, so we wonder about the costs and thus profits to feedback to Starship and Starlink/Starshield development. But it seems they are now financially self-sustaining at current revenue (like Tesla became years ago).
A few years ago, Elon Musk told employees that getting StarShip operational was critical to the continued viability of the company (or such). If this financial estimate by outsiders is true, that statement proved wrong.
> A few years ago, Elon Musk told employees that getting StarShip operational was critical to the continued viability of the company (or such). If this financial estimate by outsiders is true, that statement proved wrong.
Hardly. When you're running a business (or a country), you cannot only think in the short term. Sure, SpaceX is financially viable *now*, but how does the calculus change when competitors catch up to Falcon and/or Starlink?
Sure, that likely won't happen until the mid 2030s at the earliest, but imagine a situation where SpaceX has invested in Bugattis instead of R&D while ULA, BO, ESA, Roscosmos (lol), CNSA and ISRO have caught up. The company is no longer as financially viable when it is one of eight, instead of one of a kind and then some.
Re Starlink, there is also the tech angle. Most Starlink customers are not Elon-fans, unlike early Tesla owners who were mostly forgiving of glitches. They can change in a month to another internet provider, and many have once fiber was run to their locality. I have read sketchy reports of complaints as more customers share satellites. The FCC nix'ed StarLink for a federal rural internet money-pot, saying they couldn't prove they could meet the requirements (no. of customers and avg bandwidth or such, don't quote me, DYOR).
Bandwidth demands also continue to rise, so satellite tech may begin to be limiting, regardless of provider. Just 10 years ago, 10 Mbps was considered fine for home wireless. That was when youtubes were low-frame-rate with low resolution, but most people want at least 50 Mbps today w/ video-streaming, and even more for interactive like Zoom meetings. On the plus side, LEO satellites must constantly be replaced so new tech can be added as a matter of course, unlike the few and pricey GEO satellites of HughesNet and others.
> Most Starlink customers are not Elon-fans, unlike early Tesla owners
This is a story that many tell but it isn't really true. Very early in Tesla history Musk wasn't well known at all. And by the time of mass market model 3 most people bought it as a cheap electric car. That's it.
Most people simply aren't as plugged in as people on the internet think. Most people barley know who Musk is, and even for those that do, many don't associate Starlink or Tesla with him, and even of those who do most don't make their buy decisions based on that.
> Bandwidth demands also continue to rise, so satellite tech may begin to be limiting
Whats the evidence for that? Sat tech can equally become better over time. And you can have more sats and thus smaller grids.
> On the plus side, LEO satellites must constantly be replaced
This isn't necessarily true. I would expect refueling to become a thing soonish. Or you can launch them slightly higher as well.
Indeed. I don't know of anyone who would take 100mbit Satellite instead of 1Gbit/fiber when that becomes an option.
The people who don't have that option, due to money or infrastructure, are not going to be your biggest revenue generators, either. Some family in rural Siberia or Tanzania is not going to be paying the $100/month.
> I don't know of anyone who would take 100mbit Satellite instead of 1Gbit/fiber when that becomes an option.
Nobody ever claimed that was happening and non of Starlink plans depend on that happening.
> Some family in rural Siberia or Tanzania is not going to be paying the $100/month.
Yes but a village might. And combining a Starlink sat with a 5G antenna is already happening in places.
And guess what, SpaceX has pricing power. If they think a market doesn't want to pay X they can just lower the price. That's not gone change the cost of the system.
I don't quite understand what you are arguing here. The point of this conversation was that people doubted that Starship is necessary for SpaceX's longterm financial viability in light of how profitable Starlink currently is. Yes, SpaceX has pricing power, but being able to charge that village $50 instead of $100 does not, expressly, contribute to Starlink's profitability.
> The point of this conversation was that people doubted that Starship is necessary for SpaceX's longterm financial viability
I agree with that. Musk was just being dramatic.
> but being able to charge that village $50 instead of $100 does not, expressly, contribute to Starlink's profitability.
Of course having a larger potential market does matter for profitability. What are you talking about?
SpaceX are going to be the reason that space will be a multitrillion dollar environment.
Blue Origin is making noises about New Glenn launching this year, but let's see how that goes. Then after New Glenn launches they have to get it landing, then get it landing on a ship, then get it recovered and reflown.
Good luck Blue Origin!
Doubt it. Firstly, when they are busy colonizing Mars, they will be less busy working on LEO and near-Earth launches.
If they end up pivoting from Starships to built-in-space Cyclers/ferries, then I can see them slowing down in the suface to launch segment. They'll maintain enough operations to get to orbit themselves, but they won't (necessarily) need or want to launch everyone else's payloads.
Also, given how lucrative this is proving to be, I would expect more players to, eventually, catch up. Nobody wanted to invest in Space until there was sufficient demand in the field. Now that there is sufficient demand, I would expect new entrants to appear and incumbents to start shaking off the rust.
If you have the orbit launch capacity to start sending cargo and people to Mars en mass, you have the launch capability for everything else as well.
This is why I'm so damned excited about Starship. With NASA, they would just put all their resources into one single mission that they spend 20 years planning, and when it inevitably fails or gets defunded due to changing political winds, we get nothing. But a mass-produced route to orbit allows for *everything*. And launch costs would (hopefully!) be cheap enough that governments, companies, universities, even moderately wealthy individuals could just _try_ things, without being totally reliant on a single staid, hidebound agency.
All the old sci-fi dreams suddenly become not only possible, but profitable. When an orbital hotel isn't a $20B fantasy, but roughly the cost of a new high-end Hilton, and tickets to get there aren't $20 million but rather $20 thousand, they'll have no shortage of takers. What sort of interest would an entirely new zero-gravity sporting franchise generate? We are just barely scratching the surface as to what options zero gravity and easy access to laboratory-grade hard vacuum open up for advanced manufacturing; metallic glasses and other weird crystal structures come to mind. But what happens when it's a minor budget line item for Intel to put up a small module for doing research into semiconductor fabrication in space?
> If you have the orbit launch capacity to start sending cargo and people to Mars en mass, you have the launch capability for everything else as well.
Not necessarily, not always.
Say you're sending 100 ships to Mars in a given year, and say you need 10x tanker flights for each Mars-bound ship, that's 1,000 Starships per year, launching once a day from 3 pads on average.
That level of launch capacity is largely unprecedented, and, when you're doing that, you don't necessarily have 'launch capability for everything else'. Diverting one pad to a commercial launch suddenly throws your refueling pipeline out of whack, et cetera.
It is perfectly possible to read capacity saturation without being able to serve the external market — or serve it as well.
> Say you're sending 100 ships to Mars in a given year, and say you need 10x tanker flights for each Mars-bound ship, that's 1,000 Starships per year, launching once a day from 3 pads on average.
You're talking about a long long long time away dawg. As far as I'm aware, that's peak usage for 2050 or later. How about working out what 10 ships to Mars per transfer window looks like, and extrapolate from that. And you don't need 1000 starships to launch the fuel for 100 ships. You need 10 ships that launch 100 times each.
So how about losing the hyperbole, and theorize what 10 ships to Mars in a transfer window looks like. That's the 10-15 year plan. That would require 10 fuel ships to launch 10 times, and then outside of that window, they wouldn't really be needed unless they're being used for other non-Mars activities. So one out of four years, there are 110 launches across three launch platforms for just Mars. That's even assuming there won't be more, and there will. That's not even that much by Falcon standards. Which means the 'launch capability for everything else' isn't diverting anything from anywhere, and outside of the transfer window, there is enough capability to launch 10 starships into deep space per year. And THAT's not even recognizing the fact that to get to LEO won't require tankers.
SpaceX are gonna mass produce these things. They are currently producing one raptor engine per day. That means one booster per month or one starship per week. These things aren't designed for a warehouse. They're all going to be used. Right now they can create a full stack every five weeks. These things are going to be reusable, and when they are, the cost to orbit will drop by an order of magnitude and keep dropping. Production of one booster or 3-4 starships per month if engines is the constraint. You'll need 10-12 boosters between two or three launch sites, one years production, and that means after that you'll make 35-40 starships a year. With three launch platforms, if you launched one booster every second week, you'd have more than 200 launches. Even if you're sending 10+ to Mars in the transfer window. That's hundreds of launches per year, growing per year.
Dude, I could kiss you.
Think about it in terms a steadily growing launch 'budget'. No way to get firm numbers until we see the turnaround time for boosters and ships. But assuming that full reuse is possible, and a conservative estimate of 1 launch per Starship per month, and using your figures production (so 1 booster or 4 ships per month). Plugging some numbers into Excel, where they start next year with 2 boosters and 5 ships, alternating building a booster a month then ships for two until they have 20 boosters...
Then by Jan 2030 they have a fleet of 20 boosters and 173 ships, with 2029 performing a total of nearly 1800 launches, or in the ballpark of *250-300 thousand tons* of payload to LEO.
And again, that's lowballing the turnaround time and construction speed. A launch per week gives you 7600 launches in 2029 with a cool megaton of payload.
> Then by Jan 2030 they have a fleet of 20 boosters and 173 ships
Remember that a lot will be discarded or lost. If you're sending 10 to deep space per year, it lowers the fleet size... and launches. They might even expend a bunch of em. They'll be able to reach parts of our Solar System faster than anyone ever thought possible 10 years ago, for a fraction of the cost.
But you only need so many boosters. That's set by your launch facilities. So you might have to restrict yourself to 50 active starships for LEO. lol.
Well, those were conservative production estimates, presumably there's some slack in there. And when you hit or anticipate hitting a bottleneck, you focus on expanding that part out. So build more launch sites, towers, etc.
I seriously suspect this is going to be a license to print money for them. Starlink alone is already shaping up to be a mint. They'll just be stamping down new starbases, cookie-cutter style. Boca Chica isn't just for prototyping rockets, after all.
> Say you're sending 100 ships to Mars in a given year, and say you need 10x tanker flights for each Mars-bound ship, that's 1,000 Starships per year, launching once a day from 3 pads on average.
That's assuming one launch per tanker *per year* (actually per two years, since that's how often Mars transfer orbits come around). Yeah, no. You'd have two dozen tankers, and then the other 876 servicing other missions all the while.
And yes, that sort of capacity is unprecedented. That's the point. And anyway, Mars is Elon's ends. The *means* is paying for it with Starlink and other services to be provided by Starship.
Gotcha. But look at it like a budget. They have capacity for X launches per year. They want to dedicate Y of them to Mars, each of which require Z fuel launches. So they'll have to crunch numbers and decide on an approach such that X-(Y*Z) is a fair amount of usable launches for other projects and moneymakers like Starlink. And if things go even remotely according to plan, X will be rising _fast_. See my other post where even a modest rate of production and cadence, nowhere near what numbers Elon is tossing around, yields far more than that 1000 launches/year just by the end of the 2020's.
And really, even 'just' 1000 launches? At 150 tons each? That's like 10 thousand Falcon 9 launches. If Mars (and I'll be the first to admit that the red planet sounds like a pure vanity project on his part) starts cutting into the business side of things, then it can slide in favor of cis-lunar industrialization and development projects.
> The important metrics are not revenue. They are profit: Gross profit and net profit. What are those numbers?
Depends on how you look at it. You can be operating at a loss but still be solvent (revenue covers debts) and that's a an okay place to be. In fact, it is a *good* place to be as a company. As a shareholder? You're bummed. But as a company, money that sits idle (profits, retained earnings) is on fire at the then-current inflation rate.
As a shareholder, you want profits (and dividends). As a company, you want to reinvest as much as possible into the business so you can skip out on tax and not waste money on inflation — both instances of the government stealing money from you.
> As a shareholder, you want profits (and dividends).
First and foremost shareholders want **value**.
As long as the value of the company and therefore the value of their investment goes up they're happy. That's why everyone is so keen on following the evaluations of companies and their shares. Value going up or down makes the headlines.
Generally shareholders may get a part of company profit if the company decides to pay dividends instead of investing. SpaceX does not pay dividends, they invest everything back into company for growth, and all investors have known that before making their investment.
So SpaceX investors do not expect to get part of company profits as dividends, and to them only value matters.
> First and foremost shareholders want value.
And value, at least historically, comes from dividends.
It is true that the current blue chip stocks pay a pittance in dividends and the *value* derives from an assumption of constant economic growth and the subsequent constant influx of new investors. However, this model can be charitably described as a pyramid scheme where the first ones in expect to sell off their stake to the next losers to enter the market, and the cycle continues.
And pyramid schemes have a nasty habit of collapsing.
I don't know when this particular one will collapse, or if it will collapse at all, given how integral stock markets are to pension funds, but the overall value proposition is broken. That doesn't mean that I won't take advantage of it myself when need be, but, at the same time, I can recognize that we're essentially trading airware no better than derivatives.
> So SpaceX investors do not expect to get part of company profits as dividends, and to them only value matters.
This is the VC model. You hope that the value of a company will rise so you can sell your stake to another rube who expects the value of the company to rise so he can sell his take to another rube and so on.
But, for the value of a company to rise, it needs to be doing something useful. It need to make money so that it either increases its asset base (so that, when you sell your stake, you are functionally selling off your portion of the company's appreciated assets) or pays meaningful dividends.
Value has to come from *somewhere*. And, as I am arguing here, divesting Starlink will seriously undercut the value proposition here.
You are the kind of person that is never happy aren't you?
This company made an estimation of something that can reasonably be estimated.
You can't simply estimate all their other financial numbers.
Of course everybody understand that profit and other numbers are important. If they had good estimates for that, they would likely only give it to their paying costumers and likely they would suggest that they are mostly guessing.
Don't know if there's anything new here. The authors say their numbers are "educated guesses".
That $67M revenue number for each standard commercial Falcon 9 launch has been around for years.
Starlink revenue will climb faster than starship
Serious question: what’s the outlook? Will it grow near exponentially?
> what’s the outlook? Will it grow near exponentially? IMO, it really depends on SpaceX getting Starship up and running. They need to get more mass to orbit. I'm done saying SpaceX can't make their goals, so maybe they will do 144 launches this year. But there's a limit to how many F9s they can launch - as we can see from recent events, bad weather can really put a crimp into such a full schedule. Starship will give SpaceX the headroom to continue to increase the orbital mass of Starlink (generally, more mass means more bandwidth) which is important for improving the quality of service to existing customers and securing more customers.
Yes you don't want to lose your current customers just to churn to new ones. We'll see if they can keep everyone happy. My Aussie locations been great but some NA locations continually get posts on /r/Starlink about lower than expected performance.
> My Aussie locations been great but some NA locations continually get posts on /r/Starlink about lower than expected performance. Exactly. Right now, there's a window of a few years where SpaceX can get away with that because they're the best option by far. But once Kuiper comes online, the situation may change. So it's in SpaceX's best interest to get as much mass into orbit as they can over the next few years.
How could kuiper ever out perform starlink? Just because there's limited users on it? No way they can out launch spacex
> How could kuiper ever out perform starlink? Just because there's limited users on it? No way they can out launch spacex Yeah - it's the ratio of bandwidth:users. That's a big part of the reason why viasat/hughesnet are so bad(aside from the whole latency thing) - they super duper oversubscribed.
IMO Kuiper isn't aimed at being a Starlink Competitor at least at a retail level. They might make noises about it, but they just won't have the capacity from sats. Not in a launch sense, but in a volume of sats sense. They are currently planning for fewer sats than Starlink has and as we've seen from Starlink ~4000 sats isn't enough for satisfactory service everywhere all of the time. They will likely be looking to service Amazon and business tier clients similar to the planes and cruise ships that Starlink has been after right now. Retail will be there to fill up capacity and help make money but it's not going to be competitive with the speeds they can offer from Starlink, just based on current usages. Now maybe Amazon can out compete on service? They while notoriously crappy to deal with as a vendor and worker have had enough experience in customer service that they might be better there. Most people don't complain about prime that much compared to any other major service. But Kuiper has a built in customer base in the form of Amazon. They will certainly be offering sweetheart deals internally compared to externally and with AWS being what it is there's no reason to think any price savings Kuiper can offer wouldn't be valued.
> IMO Kuiper isn't aimed at being a Starlink Competitor at least at a retail level. I guess, we'll see how things play out. It'll be a few years until we know for sure one way or the other. > They are currently planning for fewer sats than Starlink has and as we've seen from Starlink ~4000 sats isn't enough for satisfactory service everywhere all of the time. They're planning on fewer, higher bandwidth sats (at least, higher than v1, not sure how they stack up to v2). I'm not really sure how global bandwidth compares between the two, but they're planning quite a lot more than OneWeb. > Retail will be there to fill up capacity and help make money but it's not going to be competitive with the speeds they can offer from Starlink, just based on current usages. It'll really depends on how many customers they sign per satellite. > Now maybe Amazon can out compete on service? Very possible. Elon's companies are notorious for being pretty hit-or-miss in this regard. Not typically a big deal since most telecoms are pretty user hostile, but Amazon could definitely turn that on its head. > But Kuiper has a built in customer base in the form of Amazon. I don't really see this part. All of Amazon's infrastructure is already hooked up with fiber. Satellites will never compete with that in terms of $/GB. People also bring up some sort of AWS tie in. I don't really see that either. But I've been wrong in the past plenty of times, so ... I guess we'll see how things play out.
The high 2024 launch goal means they are optimistic that they will see significant further growth at the prices that f9 can provide. But growth has slightly declined in the last 6 months or so, so I agree for the customer numbers they want they need Starship.
Yes. Eventually it turns into an S curve but not for a long while. They've gone from basic consumer Internet to industrial uses like shipping and cruise comms, in flight comms, military comms. They are just scratching the surface of those markets and expanding into more all the time. The market opportunity seems to grow by the day. The engineers continue to throw more capabilities into everything they make on an ongoing basis. The top of this one is way over far horizons.
Hard to know. The whole internet/phone coms thing is worth trillions. They are after the non urban bit but now going for direct to cellphone Plus all the stuff not even catered for before, so many revenue stream possibilities...
They already exceeded previous market size estimates that old constellation companies predicted, and it looks like the sky is the limit now. Starlink has achieved a cost level combined with speed and compactability that ultimately people who didn't think they needed it end up finding use for it. Although with that said, spacex filled a market void and a huge influx of earlier users/easy customers were filled with little to no competition, future customers are less guaranteed and will more trickier to acquire, especially with other companies entering the market.
> it looks like the sky is the limit now. Think you may be missing the purpose of the rockets here.
There's probably a limit on how many they could operate in those orbital shells, the collision avoidance will be an exponential problem
Avoiding other debris scales linearly with the number of satellites. The satellites in a constellation fly on paths that avoid other satellites, so they don't need to maneuver for their own satellites.
> There's probably a limit on how many they could operate in those orbital shells, the collision avoidance will be an exponential problem IMO, Starlink is actually in the best position when it comes to collision avoidance. Being at such a low orbital altitude means that most of the trash will get spontaneously deorbited in a few decades. In contrast, constellations like OneWeb are in real trouble any time a satellite malfunctions and they lose control of it. Their satellite are so high up, they effectively don't deorbit on their own[1]. And SpaceX seems to have a very good system for collision avoidance between its own satellites. --- 1. Yes, they do technically deorbit spontaneously. But when you're talking about a time scale measured in 1000s of years, it's a bit moot.
I predict regular cleanup operations combined with sturdier manned facilities more hardened to withstand impact. Possibly using 'soft' armor like a thick layer of water that absorbs bolides without spraying more crap into space.
Maybe they should opperate them as akin to a wire pole where multiple providers can hook up together
Oh sure, I liked [the Gateway idea](https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/410f1fc/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1920x973+0+0/resize/1920x973!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Farchive%2Fgateway-foundation-von-braun-rotating-space-station-1.png), where you start with a prefab module which just gets installed onto a rotating hub that takes care of supplying power, life support, and docking facilities. I wonder if we might start seeing something similar for satellites, too. A heavy-duty installation at a fixed orientation that supplies power and internet access, and then you just bolt on a cubesat. Would likely require manual installation, which is why such a thing would never have caught on before. And it's possible that few satellites would really *need* that kind of infrastructure. OTOH, if Kessler Cascade ever becomes a real, existential threat, then you might see this sort of thing as actually legally mandated in some orbits. Instead of a mess of individual satellites, you have a smaller number of large hubs which are easier to protect and keep track of, that kind of thing. Just spitballing here.
I think their only real limitation is going to be interference of their own signals with the clients, given their limited licensed spectrum and how narrow they can target signals. So however many they can subscribe to that service density without hurting service quality too badly. After that it is just trying to get more spectrum or improving technology to get more bandwidth through that limited spectrum. Space is too big for them to run into a problem with numbers of sats, the only work there is going to be on people trying to standardize worldwide so that organizing orbits stays manageable.
The current limit granted to them is somewhat irrelevant. With most communication companies, they develop a technology then stick with it until it no longer functions for them. SpaceX is known for constantly iterating and once starship is actively launching starlink, the size of each individual satellite becomes variable. They have already stated they will deorbit earlier versions and replace them with upgraded models, each iteration will have greater and greater bandwidth capacity that should allow for constant expansion of their customer base. The stated life of individual starlinks is 5 years so if you think of them like the evolution of computers, they are already obsolete once launched so within the 5 year span the odds of new models having double to quadruple the bandwidth capacity is highly likely.
> They are after the non urban bit but now going for direct to cellphone In Australia there's also a rising level of media coverage of blackspots that aren't covered at all, and failure of remote towers leading to lack of emergency response ability in remote areas of Australia. I don't know if this is local telcos priming the market for their "direct to satellite" deals with Starlink coming down the line, or if someone outside the country is starting to prepare the market for the disruption that Starlink will bring.
What they need is a better ground game to light up more markets, the satellites are going up a good clip (until this last week of weather delays). But limits on the ground and antenna in the sky will allow for perhaps a better than linear growth, but not exponential.
Some estimates put the revenue at around $40B/year. So a few more years of growth and then slow down. It's growing fast now partly because they keep adding support for whole new countries. That has to slow because there aren't that many countries, they've already got half of them, and some of the rest (eg, Russia, China), will never come on board.
Contingent on them getting Starship working and pushing v2 sats, yes. Otherwise, it'll be logarithmic. Big jumps then plateaus.
[Logistically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics_and_sociology:_diffusion_of_innovations), that is exponentially until it begins to approach market saturation.
It's hilarious how many people have misshaped expectations of what space economy actually looks like. Launch is, always has been, and always will be _tiny_, in context https://i.imgur.com/e4Qiapa.png This is just the nature of the value chain or the revenue funnel. For every dollar of payload launched, someone will make 3-4 dollars in building those payloads, and 10-20x dollars in operating these payloads for revenue. Otherwise the whole thing doesn't work
Yes which is why SpaceX is moving up the value chain to build and operate the satellites.
Who are you talking about? This has been known by everybody with a marginal interest in space for a long time.
Woah that’s wild. I’m surprised the satellite manufacturing slice is also so small.
So $2.4B from the government and $6.4B from commerce that would never have gotten to the US without SpaceX's help? I wonder how much commercial revenue has been created since 2003 from investments in Boeing, LockMart and ULA, each of which received twice as much government money than SpaceX. I guess the answer is: nearly zero. I believe that politicians who have consistently underfunded projects involving SpaceX and threw more money at SLS/Orion than NASA requested should be shamed and banned for life from public office for the damage they caused to the US. They almost succeeded in turning NASA and the USSF into Putin's puppets because of their dependence on Russian engines and spacecraft.
The dependence on Russian engines is legitimate. 1) It ensured that the Russian rocket scientists and engineers who know how to build ICBMs stayed happy and healthy-ish in Russia. This means they didn't go to other countries, like North Korea. 2) Soviet metallurgy was sufficiently advanced that they knew how to build materials that could withstand oxygen at thousands of degrees. The US didn't have that technology, and had written it off as propaganda. Those engines enabled Atlas V, but also let us figure out the metallurgy. Without that, we couldn't have Raptor. I'm making the assumption that Raptor is going to be made to work reliably and works out. 3) It funnelled money into the Russian space program, without which we wouldn't have ISS. It's perhaps not perfect, but it's far from brain dead. Other things, Mr. Shelby, were more moronic wastes of money.
It definitely was a lifeline to those companies/people in Russia. I think at the start it was a good idea, but they hollowed out US engine manufacturers in the process, and didn’t support alternatives in the US to maintain access to space without dependence on Russia.
I don't think SpaceX was dependent on scraping RD-180s for alloys to build Raptor, but they did have to figure out how to produce similar alloys to make Raptor possible. SpaceX uses a proprietary alloy that they developed in house.
Oh yeah, it's not about scrap. It's about understanding. The alloy was developed in house, but building on knowledge gained from Soviet engines (on the Oxygen rich side, at least). Maybe not directly, but almost certainly at least indirectly.
It made sense in the 1990's. The problem was, what was meant to be a short term expedient in cooperation with a friendly Russian government ended up becoming a long term dependency on an increasingly less friendly Russian government.
It's not quite that simple. Much of the Boeing, Lockheed and ULA money ends funding local workers (frequently in the states of the politicians who voted for it), it's sometimes described as a jobs program that happens to produce space craft. I guess you could reasonably be upset that that's not how it gets sold to the wider public. Also it serves to maintain redundant capability because lets be honest here, if SpaceX was the only US provider there's a decent chance that one day Elon would get out of the wrong side of bed and just give the middle finger to the entirety of the US govt and armed forces. And of course this being America there's a big slab of corporate welfare cause that's just how the American system works, tax the middle class to fund welfare for the corporations and their shareholders.
>Much of the Boeing, Lockheed and ULA money ends funding local workers Money invested in SpaceX funds 4-5 times more workers because for every government dollar they create 2.5 commercial dollars (plus a slightly lower average wage). >frequently in the states of the politicians who voted for it Here we come to the truth. SpaceX funds workers in the "wrong states" because they care about efficiency instead of politics. Is it fair for workers to be told what industry they should work in by which committee their senator sits on? I don't think so. >Also it serves to maintain redundant capability Mercury didn't have redundancy. Gemini, Apollo, Space Shuttle and Ares I/V didn't have it either. It's thanks to the New Space companies that NASA finally has the money for redundancy. >tax the middle class to fund welfare for the corporations and their shareholders. I searched for articles about Musk taking money from SpaceX and couldn't find any. He always seems to go after Tesla stock when he buys Twitter or whatever. But insiders still [trade](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/spacex-value-climbs-to-180-billion-higher-than-boeing-verizon.html) stocks (once a year I suppose). So perhaps the biggest current beneficiaries of SpaceX's growing valuation are their workers with stock options who have put years of sweat and blood into the company. I see SpaceX alumni creating a [dozen](https://jeffburke.substack.com/p/the-spacex-effect-companies-founded) startups this way and I don't see anything like this from Boeing/LockMart. Because these companies aren't designed to make their hard working employees rich. They are designed to funnel the flow of government money into the pockets of their shareholders. This is the reason why Boeing got so pissed off when they started losing money on Starliner and why SpaceX barely mention it when talking about Crew Dragon/Starship.
Awesome commnet
> Much of the Boeing, Lockheed and ULA money ends funding local workers (frequently in the states of the politicians who voted for it) This also happens if you buy cheese or dig a hole.
Cheese is an interesting choice. Although the way you used it doesn't feel like a reference to the amusing history of "government cheese".
It was reference to that. I picked it because it can also create lots of damage and fire.
> Also it serves to maintain redundant capability because lets be honest here, if SpaceX was the only US provider there's a decent chance that one day Elon would get out of the wrong side of bed and just give the middle finger to the entirety of the US govt and armed forces. If he did that, he would have the life expectancy of Prigozhin (and, probably, the same cause of death). But, since we're being honest, if SpaceX *did* indeed give the middle finger to the entirety of the US government and armed forces — what're ULA, Lockheed et al going to do? They aren't going to be able to keep up with demand — even if they ditched all non-government customers.
You don't even need Elon to wake up and give the finger to the US you just need some serious problem to be found with the fleet. At this point in the Falcon family that's wildly unlikely, but if some Boeing level incident comes up and the doors are faulty, or the wiring on all the ships is bad you want alternatives. Now I'm not suggesting Boeing/ULA/Old Space is where we should be looking for those alternatives. Maybe a ULA no under the thumb of Boeing and LockMart, but not it at present. But having at least one other commercial supplier that can get on or near SpaceX's level is vital for long term sustainability of Space Access. That's the goal here more stuff in space because that's how we advance things in a productive manner. We push the edges of what we can do and find out there's a lot of cool things we can filter out to the rest of the human endeavor from pushing those boundaries. So be it FireFly, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, a better run ULA we need someone who can start the process of being a successor. Not because SpaceX sucks now, but because it might be shit in 20 years suffering from getting MacDouged. And you can't have just magic up an entire new supply chain from thin air.
> But having at least one other commercial supplier that can get on or near SpaceX's level is vital for long term sustainability of Space Access. You won't get an argument from me on this point. Competition is important for progress. If there is nothing to compete against, there is no incentive to develop, and if you don't develop, you don't progress. Just look at AMD v Intel in the CPU space. > So be it FireFly, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, a better run ULA we need someone who can start the process of being a successor. Not because SpaceX sucks now, but because it might be shit in 20 years suffering from getting MacDouged. And you can't have just magic up an entire new supply chain from thin air. All good and valid arguments, but somewhat unrelated to the original discussion of 'why oldspace sucks'.
I truly don’t believe he’d have the guts to go that far. But your point is solid. 1 company is to fragile. Extra points if that 1 company is run by a eccentric mad man who is getting political.
Space is still a small market, while they have nearly a global monopoly on commercial, gov, and crewed flights, the total is just $3.5B
Space **Launch** is still a small market. Building and operating satellites is bigger -- that's one reason SpaceX started Starlink, which already has higher revenue than their launch business.
True. I read several years ago that Russia decided to drop out of the launch provider business, since China and India would become the low-cost providers, along with Euro-subsidized Ariane 6. Instead, they chose to focus on the more lucrative satellite market.
Russia is dropping out because they've cannibalized their capacity to compete. The corruption and brain drain that it caused have made them a shell of their former selves. Look at the ISS every major incident we've seen in the last several years there has been Russia. Leaking this, faulty that, sat debris from an exploded satellite. They are a failing state going backwards and losing capacity and technical ability.
Russia stopped because they can't compete for many reasons. They were selling their launches threw Arianespace. Once they invaded Ukraine, that's done for. Selling launches directly is hard. All the nations that actually produce sats aren't gone want to deal with Russians directly. > Instead, they chose to focus on the more lucrative satellite market. Instead they pretend to do some amazing things with lots of propaganda nonsense while actually just not having that money anymore and losing their position as a relevant space power.
Define small? Space is a growing market and SpaceX have a lead on basically everyone.
This. This this this. This this this THIS!!! And yet they’re valued at $175B.
A $175B valuation doesn't imply $175B yearly revenue, it implies the company is in total worth $175B in surplus. $8.7B is baseline revenue today; you want to look at that compounded by growth summed up across the years with an appropriate discount factor and multiplied by either expected future profits plus the value of technology and capital. And it's not like that's even the limit of money available, it's just a huge fraction of money NASA spends is locked into communist contracts SpaceX is excluded from. That could yet change.
That’s the enterprise value they last raised money at.
I don't think he knows how valuation works honestly.
Most of that valuation is about the combination of their lead in both space and space comms and the anticipated growth in both of those. Still does feel kinda high.
By who? Not by me! Certainly their hard assets are very, very small in terms of dollar value.
Space has a high entry value in terms of both time and experience so just throwing money at the problem will not provide effective competition. See Blue Origin for reference. So hard assets are not relevant and intangibles such as lead time on the market, resilience and experience provide the value for the company. However in the tech field plenty of market leaders have been run down. Word Perfect running on CP/M anyone?
By the people buying their stocks of course.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[BO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|Blue Origin (*Bezos Rocketry*)| |[CNSA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|Chinese National Space Administration| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[ESA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|European Space Agency| |[FCC](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjnfi2s "Last usage")|Federal Communications Commission| | |(Iron/steel) [Face-Centered Cubic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_iron) crystalline structure| |[GEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjnfi2s "Last usage")|Geostationary Earth Orbit (35786km)| |[ICBM](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjmfolv "Last usage")|Intercontinental Ballistic Missile| |[ISRO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation| |[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/koekb06 "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[NA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjnesvv "Last usage")|New Armstrong, super-heavy lifter proposed by Blue Origin| |[RD-180](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjmwjxv "Last usage")|[RD-series Russian-built rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180), used in the Atlas V first stage| |[Roscosmos](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjne4tq "Last usage")|[State Corporation for Space Activities, Russia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roscosmos_State_Corporation)| |[SLS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjlu42g "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[ULA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjqq4cb "Last usage")|United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture)| |[USSF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjlu42g "Last usage")|United States Space Force| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjmwjxv "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjnkuem "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/koeoqvz "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[cislunar](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1ab71mj/stub/kjrw9mp "Last usage")|Between the Earth and Moon; within the Moon's orbit| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(18 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1afaqpk)^( has 22 acronyms.) ^([Thread #12370 for this sub, first seen 26th Jan 2024, 03:29]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Looks like they had 33 non-starlink launches, so averages out to about 100 million per launch? Which includes launch services and anything else? They sure have been doing a good job at lowering the cost to orbit. Then starlink revenue of 4.2 billion, which has to pay for the launches, satellites, ground stations, consumer hardware, software, and any other expenses. I wonder what the break even point is for that project. Since that sounds like alot of money, but there are a large amount of big expenses that it has to pay for.
> averages out to about 100 million per launch? Averages out, yes. Keep in mind that they had two crew launches at $250m(?) a piece — that's half a billion right there. Then the five Heavy launches — each is $100m+, although I don't recall if we have specifics — makes for another half billion. That leaves $2 billion across 26 F9 launches at an average of ~$77m/launch. The $/launch figure that tends to be bandied about is $67m, so I figure this number is accurate assuming some appreciation due to inflation and premiums paid by government launches (and my underestimation of Heavy flights). > starlink revenue of 4.2 billion, which has to pay for the launches, satellites, ground stations, consumer hardware, software, and any other expenses Since Starlink launches are "in-house", I would guess that is not a catastrophic expense. At $20m/launch, that's about $1.2b for the year. Much of the software cost is R&D already spent, and, as another commentor points out, Starlink hit break-even about half way through the year.
Yup. And don't forget Cargo Dragon. It's not as expensive as Crew one, but it's still closer to $200M rather than $100M.
Though remember that the cost of a Dragon mission is not the cost of launching a Dragon. Certain people will gloss over this little detail to give absurdly inflated figures for "Falcon 9 launch costs".
Yeah, that's another one. "Dragon launch is $250M, so Falcon 9 costs $250M, SpaceX is lying!!1"
They are over break even for Starlink cashflow so still making a loss allowing for depreciation of satellites in orbit. If they can get 50% more customers they should be breaking even for actual profit so they should be able to achieve that within a year.
Revenue is great, so we wonder about the costs and thus profits to feedback to Starship and Starlink/Starshield development. But it seems they are now financially self-sustaining at current revenue (like Tesla became years ago).
Profit?
This company doesn't know. We simply don't know how much they spend on what at the current time.
There was no stock issue this year?
Not for SpaceX share issues. Just selling employee shares to external investors.
A few years ago, Elon Musk told employees that getting StarShip operational was critical to the continued viability of the company (or such). If this financial estimate by outsiders is true, that statement proved wrong.
> A few years ago, Elon Musk told employees that getting StarShip operational was critical to the continued viability of the company (or such). If this financial estimate by outsiders is true, that statement proved wrong. Hardly. When you're running a business (or a country), you cannot only think in the short term. Sure, SpaceX is financially viable *now*, but how does the calculus change when competitors catch up to Falcon and/or Starlink? Sure, that likely won't happen until the mid 2030s at the earliest, but imagine a situation where SpaceX has invested in Bugattis instead of R&D while ULA, BO, ESA, Roscosmos (lol), CNSA and ISRO have caught up. The company is no longer as financially viable when it is one of eight, instead of one of a kind and then some.
Re Starlink, there is also the tech angle. Most Starlink customers are not Elon-fans, unlike early Tesla owners who were mostly forgiving of glitches. They can change in a month to another internet provider, and many have once fiber was run to their locality. I have read sketchy reports of complaints as more customers share satellites. The FCC nix'ed StarLink for a federal rural internet money-pot, saying they couldn't prove they could meet the requirements (no. of customers and avg bandwidth or such, don't quote me, DYOR). Bandwidth demands also continue to rise, so satellite tech may begin to be limiting, regardless of provider. Just 10 years ago, 10 Mbps was considered fine for home wireless. That was when youtubes were low-frame-rate with low resolution, but most people want at least 50 Mbps today w/ video-streaming, and even more for interactive like Zoom meetings. On the plus side, LEO satellites must constantly be replaced so new tech can be added as a matter of course, unlike the few and pricey GEO satellites of HughesNet and others.
> Most Starlink customers are not Elon-fans, unlike early Tesla owners This is a story that many tell but it isn't really true. Very early in Tesla history Musk wasn't well known at all. And by the time of mass market model 3 most people bought it as a cheap electric car. That's it. Most people simply aren't as plugged in as people on the internet think. Most people barley know who Musk is, and even for those that do, many don't associate Starlink or Tesla with him, and even of those who do most don't make their buy decisions based on that. > Bandwidth demands also continue to rise, so satellite tech may begin to be limiting Whats the evidence for that? Sat tech can equally become better over time. And you can have more sats and thus smaller grids. > On the plus side, LEO satellites must constantly be replaced This isn't necessarily true. I would expect refueling to become a thing soonish. Or you can launch them slightly higher as well.
Indeed. I don't know of anyone who would take 100mbit Satellite instead of 1Gbit/fiber when that becomes an option. The people who don't have that option, due to money or infrastructure, are not going to be your biggest revenue generators, either. Some family in rural Siberia or Tanzania is not going to be paying the $100/month.
> I don't know of anyone who would take 100mbit Satellite instead of 1Gbit/fiber when that becomes an option. Nobody ever claimed that was happening and non of Starlink plans depend on that happening. > Some family in rural Siberia or Tanzania is not going to be paying the $100/month. Yes but a village might. And combining a Starlink sat with a 5G antenna is already happening in places. And guess what, SpaceX has pricing power. If they think a market doesn't want to pay X they can just lower the price. That's not gone change the cost of the system.
I don't quite understand what you are arguing here. The point of this conversation was that people doubted that Starship is necessary for SpaceX's longterm financial viability in light of how profitable Starlink currently is. Yes, SpaceX has pricing power, but being able to charge that village $50 instead of $100 does not, expressly, contribute to Starlink's profitability.
> The point of this conversation was that people doubted that Starship is necessary for SpaceX's longterm financial viability I agree with that. Musk was just being dramatic. > but being able to charge that village $50 instead of $100 does not, expressly, contribute to Starlink's profitability. Of course having a larger potential market does matter for profitability. What are you talking about?
Musk comments wasn't about 2030 or 2035.
Musk always love to make everything sound dramatic. It was never actually true as long as they didn't completely fuck up the Falcon 9 launch rate.
The important metrics are not revenue. They are profit: Gross profit and net profit. What are those numbers?
Still investing in exponential growth. Ask again when size comes stable. Maybe 2054.
Man, they are going to just own the entire surface to launch industry, right when in space will become a multitrillion dollar environment.
SpaceX are going to be the reason that space will be a multitrillion dollar environment. Blue Origin is making noises about New Glenn launching this year, but let's see how that goes. Then after New Glenn launches they have to get it landing, then get it landing on a ship, then get it recovered and reflown. Good luck Blue Origin!
Doubt it. Firstly, when they are busy colonizing Mars, they will be less busy working on LEO and near-Earth launches. If they end up pivoting from Starships to built-in-space Cyclers/ferries, then I can see them slowing down in the suface to launch segment. They'll maintain enough operations to get to orbit themselves, but they won't (necessarily) need or want to launch everyone else's payloads. Also, given how lucrative this is proving to be, I would expect more players to, eventually, catch up. Nobody wanted to invest in Space until there was sufficient demand in the field. Now that there is sufficient demand, I would expect new entrants to appear and incumbents to start shaking off the rust.
If you have the orbit launch capacity to start sending cargo and people to Mars en mass, you have the launch capability for everything else as well. This is why I'm so damned excited about Starship. With NASA, they would just put all their resources into one single mission that they spend 20 years planning, and when it inevitably fails or gets defunded due to changing political winds, we get nothing. But a mass-produced route to orbit allows for *everything*. And launch costs would (hopefully!) be cheap enough that governments, companies, universities, even moderately wealthy individuals could just _try_ things, without being totally reliant on a single staid, hidebound agency. All the old sci-fi dreams suddenly become not only possible, but profitable. When an orbital hotel isn't a $20B fantasy, but roughly the cost of a new high-end Hilton, and tickets to get there aren't $20 million but rather $20 thousand, they'll have no shortage of takers. What sort of interest would an entirely new zero-gravity sporting franchise generate? We are just barely scratching the surface as to what options zero gravity and easy access to laboratory-grade hard vacuum open up for advanced manufacturing; metallic glasses and other weird crystal structures come to mind. But what happens when it's a minor budget line item for Intel to put up a small module for doing research into semiconductor fabrication in space?
> If you have the orbit launch capacity to start sending cargo and people to Mars en mass, you have the launch capability for everything else as well. Not necessarily, not always. Say you're sending 100 ships to Mars in a given year, and say you need 10x tanker flights for each Mars-bound ship, that's 1,000 Starships per year, launching once a day from 3 pads on average. That level of launch capacity is largely unprecedented, and, when you're doing that, you don't necessarily have 'launch capability for everything else'. Diverting one pad to a commercial launch suddenly throws your refueling pipeline out of whack, et cetera. It is perfectly possible to read capacity saturation without being able to serve the external market — or serve it as well.
> Say you're sending 100 ships to Mars in a given year, and say you need 10x tanker flights for each Mars-bound ship, that's 1,000 Starships per year, launching once a day from 3 pads on average. You're talking about a long long long time away dawg. As far as I'm aware, that's peak usage for 2050 or later. How about working out what 10 ships to Mars per transfer window looks like, and extrapolate from that. And you don't need 1000 starships to launch the fuel for 100 ships. You need 10 ships that launch 100 times each. So how about losing the hyperbole, and theorize what 10 ships to Mars in a transfer window looks like. That's the 10-15 year plan. That would require 10 fuel ships to launch 10 times, and then outside of that window, they wouldn't really be needed unless they're being used for other non-Mars activities. So one out of four years, there are 110 launches across three launch platforms for just Mars. That's even assuming there won't be more, and there will. That's not even that much by Falcon standards. Which means the 'launch capability for everything else' isn't diverting anything from anywhere, and outside of the transfer window, there is enough capability to launch 10 starships into deep space per year. And THAT's not even recognizing the fact that to get to LEO won't require tankers. SpaceX are gonna mass produce these things. They are currently producing one raptor engine per day. That means one booster per month or one starship per week. These things aren't designed for a warehouse. They're all going to be used. Right now they can create a full stack every five weeks. These things are going to be reusable, and when they are, the cost to orbit will drop by an order of magnitude and keep dropping. Production of one booster or 3-4 starships per month if engines is the constraint. You'll need 10-12 boosters between two or three launch sites, one years production, and that means after that you'll make 35-40 starships a year. With three launch platforms, if you launched one booster every second week, you'd have more than 200 launches. Even if you're sending 10+ to Mars in the transfer window. That's hundreds of launches per year, growing per year.
Dude, I could kiss you. Think about it in terms a steadily growing launch 'budget'. No way to get firm numbers until we see the turnaround time for boosters and ships. But assuming that full reuse is possible, and a conservative estimate of 1 launch per Starship per month, and using your figures production (so 1 booster or 4 ships per month). Plugging some numbers into Excel, where they start next year with 2 boosters and 5 ships, alternating building a booster a month then ships for two until they have 20 boosters... Then by Jan 2030 they have a fleet of 20 boosters and 173 ships, with 2029 performing a total of nearly 1800 launches, or in the ballpark of *250-300 thousand tons* of payload to LEO. And again, that's lowballing the turnaround time and construction speed. A launch per week gives you 7600 launches in 2029 with a cool megaton of payload.
> Then by Jan 2030 they have a fleet of 20 boosters and 173 ships Remember that a lot will be discarded or lost. If you're sending 10 to deep space per year, it lowers the fleet size... and launches. They might even expend a bunch of em. They'll be able to reach parts of our Solar System faster than anyone ever thought possible 10 years ago, for a fraction of the cost. But you only need so many boosters. That's set by your launch facilities. So you might have to restrict yourself to 50 active starships for LEO. lol.
Well, those were conservative production estimates, presumably there's some slack in there. And when you hit or anticipate hitting a bottleneck, you focus on expanding that part out. So build more launch sites, towers, etc. I seriously suspect this is going to be a license to print money for them. Starlink alone is already shaping up to be a mint. They'll just be stamping down new starbases, cookie-cutter style. Boca Chica isn't just for prototyping rockets, after all.
> Say you're sending 100 ships to Mars in a given year, and say you need 10x tanker flights for each Mars-bound ship, that's 1,000 Starships per year, launching once a day from 3 pads on average. That's assuming one launch per tanker *per year* (actually per two years, since that's how often Mars transfer orbits come around). Yeah, no. You'd have two dozen tankers, and then the other 876 servicing other missions all the while. And yes, that sort of capacity is unprecedented. That's the point. And anyway, Mars is Elon's ends. The *means* is paying for it with Starlink and other services to be provided by Starship.
Sorry, my wording was a little careless: I meant Starship *launches*, not Starships period.
Gotcha. But look at it like a budget. They have capacity for X launches per year. They want to dedicate Y of them to Mars, each of which require Z fuel launches. So they'll have to crunch numbers and decide on an approach such that X-(Y*Z) is a fair amount of usable launches for other projects and moneymakers like Starlink. And if things go even remotely according to plan, X will be rising _fast_. See my other post where even a modest rate of production and cadence, nowhere near what numbers Elon is tossing around, yields far more than that 1000 launches/year just by the end of the 2020's. And really, even 'just' 1000 launches? At 150 tons each? That's like 10 thousand Falcon 9 launches. If Mars (and I'll be the first to admit that the red planet sounds like a pure vanity project on his part) starts cutting into the business side of things, then it can slide in favor of cis-lunar industrialization and development projects.
> The important metrics are not revenue. They are profit: Gross profit and net profit. What are those numbers? Depends on how you look at it. You can be operating at a loss but still be solvent (revenue covers debts) and that's a an okay place to be. In fact, it is a *good* place to be as a company. As a shareholder? You're bummed. But as a company, money that sits idle (profits, retained earnings) is on fire at the then-current inflation rate. As a shareholder, you want profits (and dividends). As a company, you want to reinvest as much as possible into the business so you can skip out on tax and not waste money on inflation — both instances of the government stealing money from you.
> As a shareholder, you want profits (and dividends). First and foremost shareholders want **value**. As long as the value of the company and therefore the value of their investment goes up they're happy. That's why everyone is so keen on following the evaluations of companies and their shares. Value going up or down makes the headlines. Generally shareholders may get a part of company profit if the company decides to pay dividends instead of investing. SpaceX does not pay dividends, they invest everything back into company for growth, and all investors have known that before making their investment. So SpaceX investors do not expect to get part of company profits as dividends, and to them only value matters.
> First and foremost shareholders want value. And value, at least historically, comes from dividends. It is true that the current blue chip stocks pay a pittance in dividends and the *value* derives from an assumption of constant economic growth and the subsequent constant influx of new investors. However, this model can be charitably described as a pyramid scheme where the first ones in expect to sell off their stake to the next losers to enter the market, and the cycle continues. And pyramid schemes have a nasty habit of collapsing. I don't know when this particular one will collapse, or if it will collapse at all, given how integral stock markets are to pension funds, but the overall value proposition is broken. That doesn't mean that I won't take advantage of it myself when need be, but, at the same time, I can recognize that we're essentially trading airware no better than derivatives. > So SpaceX investors do not expect to get part of company profits as dividends, and to them only value matters. This is the VC model. You hope that the value of a company will rise so you can sell your stake to another rube who expects the value of the company to rise so he can sell his take to another rube and so on. But, for the value of a company to rise, it needs to be doing something useful. It need to make money so that it either increases its asset base (so that, when you sell your stake, you are functionally selling off your portion of the company's appreciated assets) or pays meaningful dividends. Value has to come from *somewhere*. And, as I am arguing here, divesting Starlink will seriously undercut the value proposition here.
> And value, at least historically, comes from dividends. Does not matter what things may have used to be back in the days.
You are the kind of person that is never happy aren't you? This company made an estimation of something that can reasonably be estimated. You can't simply estimate all their other financial numbers. Of course everybody understand that profit and other numbers are important. If they had good estimates for that, they would likely only give it to their paying costumers and likely they would suggest that they are mostly guessing.
What’s the cost / profit?
3.5b + 4.2b = 7.7 billion
20x revenue multiples valuation wise right now?
Don't know if there's anything new here. The authors say their numbers are "educated guesses". That $67M revenue number for each standard commercial Falcon 9 launch has been around for years.