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> There has been the sort of myth going around that making rockets is hard. It used to be hard... 50 years ago.

For something that used to be hard, the very well-funded companies in that area besides SpaceX seem to be having a hell of a time achieving anything even remotely near comparable performance.

> Furthermore, if you have been following closely, you would have seen the huge and humiliating mess ups he had with Tesla where he literally flushed billions and billions of dollars down the toilet.

I have been following it closely since 2012. Not sure where he flushed the money down the toilet? And with that he still grew the company well. Without Elon Tesla would never have become the 666B company that is today.

> Since Musk, another 4 private companies have reached orbit, or will reach orbit this year (Firefly, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, and Virgin Orbit)

Rocket Lab was founded in 2006 and reached orbit in 2018 (and failed in 2020)?

Virgin Orbit's vehicle LauncherOne was started in 2007 (under Virgin Galactic) began operations in 2021.

And we'll see how Firefly and Relativity Space succeeds with their launches.

>I have been following it closely since 2012. Not sure where he flushed the money down the toilet?

You have been following for that long and don't know the company continues to burn cash? That they said they'd never raise money again, and then raised money about 6 times? That if it wasn't for subsidies and funky accounting there is no profit?

Tesla has had their fair share of hard times. And some mornings have been horrible after having read some Elon tweets xD

When it comes to raising cash, things change, I remember once cash raise happened immediately after their value had increased much in a short interval, so it made sense to raise. And looking back, with the company being worth 666B now, they've done a lot of right calls, but of course some wrong ones as well.

And it's a myth that Tesla doesn't do any profit. For example last quarter Tesla got around 354M in regulatory credits (this is what the anti-tesla crowd likes to point out) but the net income was 1.14B. And besides the regulatory credit should be counted, not like the oil industry hasn't had it's insane amount of subsides over the years.

>so it made sense to raise

It totally makes sense, I agree. Just seems odd to say we won't, and then do, repeatedly.

>And it's a myth that Tesla doesn't do any profit. For example last quarter Tesla got around 354M in regulatory credits (this is what the anti-tesla crowd likes to point out) but the net income was 1.14B.

It's only a myth if you don't actually examine the underlying accounting. Regulatory credits, realizing deferred revenue on FSD (which doesn't exist), expanding the accounts payable, cutting R&D, bitcoin speculation...

All of these things affect the income statement in a way that pumps income that may or may not even be sustainable. All so people will say "look, profits!"

Are they marginally profitable now? Maybe, but that's nothing to brag about at a market cap of over half a trillion dollars.

>not like the oil industry hasn't had it's insane amount of subsides over the years.

So, what's your point here? Did I say oil companies deserve subsidies? Am I looking at the financials of Exxon? Being as how Tesla vehicles have tires, plastics, a supply chain...they also benefit from oil subsidies. What does this have to do with anything?

> Are they marginally profitable now? Maybe, but that's nothing to brag about at a market cap of over half a trillion dollars.

Decent to do more than a billion in profit and they are a growth company with Giga Austin and Giga Berlin opening soon. When amazon had a similar market cap they did around 800m in profit. It's ofcourse easy in retrospect to say that amazon was a winner, but of course it was an unknown to investors and everyone placed their bets back then.

And my point with subsidies is that they affect the outcome, as they exist they have an effect on the business, and should be valued as such.

"and yes that includes reusability"

I think this is where you go astray. Reusable rockets aren't old technology. In fact, they were considered so impractical and complicated that none of the big players even tried to develop one.

In fact, even after SpaceX landed their first boosters succesfully, participants of a panel discussion organized by at an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Forum on Propulsion rejected the idea as being market-unjustified:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/expendable-rocket-bu...

I'm no Musk fan but this

> If he had never pursued reusability he would have made far, far more money from his launch business.

Strikes me as short term thinking and not true, also. The plan is to sell tickets at $400,000 each to get to Mars. There doesn't seem to be any way to achieve that without reusability. The money to be made from founding the first Mars colony supplied with reusable rockets completely dwarfs some random launch provider on Earth.

SpaceX never was and never will be a simple launch provider. If that is your lens then you are missing the company goals of 1M people living on Mars.

First, no one denies that reusability is still not profitable. This includes Musk himself and heads of all the other rocket companies who have all made it clear they aren't pursing it because these is simply no business case for it. At best maybe recovering the fairings or engines could be profitable for now.

> The plan is to sell tickets at $400,000 each to get to Mars.

His Starship is set to hold 40 people on the trip to mars. That would mean he earns 16 million per Starship sent to mars. Each Starship takes about 8 launches to fully fuel.

He currently sells 1 regular launch for 50 million each, so your numbers just don't add up. This isn't a money making scheme.

In fact, Musk would be the first person to admit he isn't trying to make money by sending people to Mars. This is his passion project. In fact, the whole reason he created his Starlink business was to pay for his efforts to colonize Mars.

> First, no one denies that reusability is still not profitable. This includes Musk himself and heads of all the other rocket companies who have all made it clear they aren't pursing it because these is simply no business case for it.

What? Here is "Musk himself" saying in a tweet that Falcon 9 only needs to be reusable 3 times to make sense economically.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1295883862380294144?s=20

Oh ok, thanks for that. The last I had heard was that it would take 10 launches to break even. It seems spaceX has been working very hard making refurbishing the boosters cheaper and cheaper over the last few years.

With reusability he can get down to as low as 2mil per launch. So even with 8 launches for refuelling, this is the correct ballpark.

> First, no one denies that reusability is still not profitable. This includes Musk himself and heads of all the other rocket companies who have all made it clear they aren't pursing it because these is simply no business case for it.

It makes no sense for them because they can't offer a low enough price and otherwise create payloads in order to achieve a flight rate.

ULA simply only has one costumer, the US military and very occasionally NASA. They have never really competition in the private market or ever tried to generate their own payloads to increase flight rate.

Arianespace is a incredibly bureaucratic organization where everything has to go threw a political process. It cost them 4 billion to create a pretty average quality large rocket and doing re-usability for them would take 1-2 decades and another 10 billion.

The idea that it is not profitable or more generally wroth it for SpaceX is crazy. SpaceX has mentioned many times that even only using the rockets 2 times already makes sense for them. They are getting 10 reuses out of the Block 5 rockets. The idea that it was not worth the investment is frankly speaking laughable.

Without re-usability things like Starlink would simply not be possible in the first place.

> He currently sells 1 regular launch for 50 million each, so your numbers just don't add up. This isn't a money making scheme.

While I agree that Mars travel is not a money making scheme, those 50 million includes a huge margin and another huge cost for the second stage.

If you assume almost no margin and you assume a equally reusable upper stage, far less operational cost, no fairing recovery cost, less refurbishment cost and so on you can get the number way lower then the current Falcon 9 price. Depending on flight rate cost in the low millions are approachable for LEO launches.

There are other opportunities, dedicate tanker Starship should reduce the number refueling required. Next generation Raptor 2 versions and new ally for the Starship should eventually make it possible deliver a 250 tons reusable. Meaning you can potentially do 4 refueling flights, not 8.

The pure business case for Mars colony still doesn't add up but low enough to make a Mars bases together with NASA totally feasible.

That ticket price is very, very optimistic. With it's 1200 t of fuel, the starship eats 240 t of methane and 960 t of oxygen. The price for methane is around 80 cents per litre, 240 t is 520 m^3 ish, so thats $420 000. Oxygen on the other hand seems to cost $10.6/kg, giving you a number of $12 000 000. Rounds out to 12 million per a single fueling. If the Starship carries 40 people that's just enough to bring the fuel cost of the LEO -> Mars trip down to $300 000. The first trip to space must cost the same amount in Starship fuel only so that's at least $600 000 per person in fuel. And this is all ignoring the Super Heavy, which will probably raise the cost over a million, in fuel alone.

Generating liquid oxygen is two orders of magnitude cheaper, making it way cheaper than methane.

Plus there isn’t enough space for 40 people, real number will probably be below 20

What it is intended to be, and what it will be, will differ greatly. 1M people living on Mars is utter fiction.

> Musk is losing money because of the reusability of his rockets. If he had never pursued reusability he would have made far, far more money from his launch business. Only now, after 10 years, are his reusable rockets just starting to break even with the cost of an expendable rocket (after reuse not before). He is pursuing reusability because it is his passion project, not because there is any money to be made from it.

Spacex can launch more rockets per year because they don't need to keep building a first stage. That's how they could launch almost 2k Starlink satellites already. If you look at the statistics, most of the launches for 2020 and 2021 have been on reused boosters.

It's organization that's hard, pulling the trigger trusting your decisions are correct, Musk seems to excel at this; more important are the Boards of Directors and leadership hierarchy that trust his process enough, and arguably he's right enough more than he's wrong.

SpaceX created the only full flow engine in history that was actually used in a flight. And they are well on track on the first fully rapid reusable rocket twice as powerful as the Saturn 5.

> Furthermore, if you have been following closely, you would have seen the huge and humiliating mess ups he had with Tesla where he literally flushed billions and billions of dollars down the toilet.

What is this in reference to?

All those manufacturing woes that happened after Elon tried to automate everything in the manufacturing process https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/13/elon-musk-admits-humans-are-...

That is called taking risk and pushing the limit. If it does not work, admit and learn then move on.

>That is called taking risk and pushing the limit

Legacy manufacturers have far more automated systems building far more complicated cars. What was "pushed to the limit"?