Elon Musk says SpaceX faces ‘genuine risk of bankruptcy’ from Starship engine
spaceexplored.com
spaceexplored.com
> The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.
> The consequences for SpaceX if we can not get enough reliable Raptors made is that we then can’t fly Starship, which means we then can’t fly Starlink Satellite V2 (Falcon has neither the volume nor the mass to orbit needed for satellite V2). Satellite V1, by itself, is financially weak, while V2 is strong.
> In addition, we are spooling up terminal production to several million units per year, which will consume massive capital, assuming that satellite V2 will be on orbit to handle the bandwidth demand. These terminals will be useless otherwise.
> What it comes down to, is that we face a genuine risk of bankruptcy if we can’t achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.
so they need cheaper and more Raptors, so that they can have more Starships, so they can launch more Starlink sats, which will fund creation of even more Starships, so they can launch to Mars...
Quite the pickle there, Mr. Musk.
Valuations:
August 2020: 46b [1]
Feb 2021: 74b [1]
Oct 2021: 100b [2]
And I'm sure a lot of private investors would love to buy a piece. Half of HN would buy at 100b valuation I think.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/04/16/is...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/08/elon-musks-spacex-valuation-...
Seems like this might just be some "c'mon guys" cheerleading to get Elon Time and Human Time to converge a bit faster.
He's said some super over-the-line shit before ("pedo guy", "S Elon's C") and it would not surprise me if this were just more of the same. Ultimately the whole thing is bottlenecked on production of unprecedented machines, and if I were in his shoes, I would be saying and doing literally anything I could think of to get the individual humans responsible for those tasks to work a) super hard and b) as close to nonstop as is physically possible.
Doesn't make it right.
>And I'm sure a lot of private investors would love to buy a piece.
Are you sure sure? Because SpaceX has been fundraising for years, and has had trouble getting financing as recently as a couple years ago. Maybe the people with the money know something you don't? Space is hard and expensive.
Investors had a sea change event in 2004, when X Prize was won; since then SpaceX was largely successful in demonstrating profitable innovations. However - judging by the absence of financing serious competitors to SpaceX - investors seems to be lagging with estimating SpaceX. So maybe - maybe - investors have still too much of doubts they've had before 2004.
These points contradict each other.
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/musk-sells-more-shares-one-b....
Take a step back and look at the technology. Sure reusable rockets are cool but still way short of what we need to make it economical at scale. People in 60s over achieved and it’ll be a long time before we surpass them. Even then we have a long way ahead. Maybe if there’s a breakthrough in propulsion, fuels etc that’ll give a 10x-100x efficiency improvement then we can hope for something in our lifetime. Otherwise I still see it as a niche activity.
I don’t really get this “single point of failure” argument. Sure, I won’t deny that risk but it’s situated in a cosmic timescale. I don’t see it with any urgency just as I don’t see earth being swallowed by the Sun or the heat death of the universe with urgency. These are cataclysmic events.
That is exactly what Starship is attempting to do.
> People in 60s over achieved and it’ll be a long time before we surpass them.
They could easily be surpassed with the same amount of money.
> Maybe if there’s a breakthrough in propulsion, fuels etc that’ll give a 10x-100x efficiency improvement then we can hope for something in our lifetime.
Full and rapid re-usability is exactly that break-threw. There is a reason every other method of transportation is very re-usable and much cheaper.
Other fuels make it more expensive, not less. Cheaper then methane is unlikely whatever it is.
> They could easily be surpassed with the same amount of money.
We're actually surpassing it every day. With the exception of manned Moon flights - largely because the lack of immediate need, and associated with that barrier of lacking specialized equipment like lunar lander - all or almost all manned and unmanned technologies are used on a substantially higher level today.
I just recently did some comparison between engines of Saturn 1B and Falcon 9 for example.
- Toxic -> Red Fuming Nitric Acid (RFNA) and pretty much any mix of liquid hydrocarbons of molecular weight / distillation fraction between Diesel and Kerosene (probably more generous than that)
- Non Toxic -> Nitrous Oxide and Propane.
This is of course not factoring in the price to performance ratio of the fuel choice which is why many rockets chose other combinations. This sort of math really only applies when you start thinking about things like "how expensive would it be to fuel a sea dragon sized rocket".
SpaceX will get methane directly from methane production on site and will use solar power that is also be on site.
Hard to see how one could beat that.
What factory in your analysis made the difference?
One big factor in favour of cryogenic fuel and oxidiser is they are much better engine and nozzle coolants in regeneratively cooled rocket engines. This is why they are so common. My analysis was based on Sea Dragon sized rockets with similarly simplistic engines not designed for reuse. The rapid reuse goals of SpaceX Starship pretty much demands regeneratively cooled rocket engines which are easiest with cryogenic at least a cryogenic oxidiser and once your working with one cryogenic liquid you may as well just go fully cryogenic with a cryogenic fuel to get even more cooling capacity.
SpaceX goes even further and does deep cryo going beyond what anybody else does. This additionally makes the fuel even denser so you can carry more fuel in the same rocket. They are the only company that has ever done that. Its huge win, for Ox its 10%, for RP-1 its about 2%, for Methane 7%. Quite amazing.
Re-usability changes everything and going to Mars as a goal also changes the design.
Your totally right about deep cryogenic subcooling/densification, it’s a technique no one else has really worked on in production systems meanwhile SpaceX has made it normal. Not only does it get you even more performance for a given unit of volume (because not only do you care about performance per unit weight you care about the density of the fuel as well) but it also gives you a better engine coolant because you can let the fuel and/or oxidiser soak more heat without running the risk of boiling your fuel in the tiny coolant pipes/channel wrapped around the engine and nozzle. This is a big win for engine life as a cool engine is an engine not trying to melt itself to bits from the inside.
Your also right about their Mars goals too, when you factor in their Mars goals it’s the obvious fuel and oxidiser combination. While it’s a process that requires lots of energy, there are extremely well established chemical processes to go from CO2 and H2O to both oxygen and methane. It makes their choice of a methalox engine basically a no-brainer.
But the problem for Elon is regulatory. Doing anything nuclear requires navigating significant regulation from start to finish. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the regulations would require SpaceX to continue filing paperwork on Earth for any humans near a reactor on Mars being exposed to more radiation from space than the reactor is emitting.
This is the antithesis of how Elon likes to work. If he’s going to get people onto Mars they can’t go and die from air and the rockets can’t be trapped there and he’s going to want to be sure about that before he launches them.
In order to do that he’s going to want to develop multiple iterations of the chemical plant equipment on earth, testing it’s robustness reliability and effectiveness. They know the solar panels will work fine, if they don’t user super expensive ones they’ll be fine using lower efficiency and just adding more square meters of solar panels… but they can’t do that with the oxygen and methane production equipment. They need to know it will work dusty, with perchlorate contamination, with variable electrical supply, and probably even survive a military style airdrop in terms of rough landing with zero impact on its ability to generate and liquefy CH4 and O2. He could split his resources and add the development of a similarly complex reactor (the majority of the complexity is likely to be regulatory since shipment to and operating on Mars rather constrains the design space for a practical reactor) or he can use heaps of reliable panels, trust he can get enough mass to the surface of mars and focus entirely on the development of the critical chemical process equipment he needs on Mars.
Are you saying he want to lower the worth of SpaceX so he can buy more of it? Can you show that he actually did that?
Seriously, the idea that he goes threw life, manages multiple company and every public statement is some 4d level stock manipulation is just galaxy brain nonsense. It literally doesn't make sense.
This appears to be a ‘you’ problem as well. You have your biases. They have theirs. To say only one person’s views lead to nonsensical outcome is a biased view.
> Are you saying he want to lower the worth of SpaceX so he can buy more of it? Can you show that he actually did that?
They didn’t say this. They wrote a vaguer statement. You jumped in and assumed a lot.
I am just trying to understand by what 5D logic you are coming to your conclusion so I am speculating.
I am literally struggling how anybody could come to such a conclusion because its so nonsensical. It just literally make no sense to interpret his action over the last 20 years with this framework.
This is exactly why it’s bias. I see Elon as half charlatan. In my eyes, it’s hard to not see this as super obvious.
For you, it’s not like that at all.
He makes far more money by simply holding stocks for the long term and making sure his companies do well. He is required to file when he is selling lots of stock and for the most part he has been holding SpaceX and Tesla stock for a long time. His package for payment for Tesla is performance based on profit and volume, not just stock price so higher stock doesn't even improve his pay at this point.
I literally do not understand the mechanics. Do you think he sent this internal email so hopefully it will be leaked, so that then SpaceX stock will be slightly lower for a while and then he illegally does insider trading based on that? And if he made lots of money from doing that, is he just hiding that? Do you think in addition to his public wealth (already one of the richest people) he is even richer and hides some even larger net-worth that he has gained threw illegal trading?
He has literally been part of a number of investigations from multiple government agencies like SEC. Because SpaceX is doing military launch and are verified for literally all US government missions, he had to be background checked by the DoD for a really high levels of security certification. And threw all of that he was constantly doing illegal insider trading and hiding billions in extra wealth?
Is that really more likely then that SpaceX actually has an issue with engine production and he really wants to fix it?
Would they let it go under?
Government should not be just handing out money without getting at least that much value back. Government may very well hire a company to do something because it's more cost effective than DIY.
"Work harder peons"
You likely meant “work harder top tiered, ridiculously paid, engineers and professionals, who could walk away at a moments notice to another ridiculously paying job if they want to.”
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Ex-SpaceX-employees-Why-did-y...
26 (launch a starship at least every two weeks) times 36 (number of raptors per starship, reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship) = 936 (They may need less powerful ones for putting starling into low earth orbit)
These things better work reliably from the start, so that they can reuse them a lot. I don’t see them _build_ hundreds of them next year.
He's setting an aim for the company and is spending resources requiring a convergence to reach certain milestones. If they borrow funds and have debt or loans they must start paying back but don't have the expected revenue coming in soon enough then they could be in trouble, but in reality so long as they're inching forward then they'll be able to get loans from any number of people who believe in what they're doing - or need them to succeed for security purposes. It's important for him to state this in order to build confidence that he's aware and to give a goal to the workforce.
Internet access is a fungible good for most people provided competition exists. I don't see how there is much of a first-to-market advantage if the product is so fungible. If it is non-fungible don't forget local companies which are first to market too. The on the ground rivals are companies native to their market and can hope for government backing against competition of the US from space. Internet is a critical infrastructure and any nation not building local networks has a huge strategic vulnerability.
This problem is worse in case of Blue Origin, though. For a company founded in 2000 and backed by one of the richest people worldwide, they have so far underdelivered to a woeful degree.
For comparison, Blue Origin has sold the BE-4 to ULA many years ago. The are testing 2 qualification engines, they have 2 engines in production that hopefully will finish sometimes in a the next few months. We don't know how many are in production beyond that but likely not all that many. These engines will still cost around 7 million $ per engine.
That is a more normal production rate, one engine in a cycle of months or even slower.
SpaceX just for the test campaign alone is already on SN-100+. Most engines are never even produced in such numbers. SpaceX already has quite high production rates relatively to what would be considered normal.
What SpaceX is attempting to do here with the Raptor, and mass producing them in a cycle of a single day is something that has never been even approximated by anybody. This is not a relatively simple engine like to Soviets use for Sozus. This is one of the most complex and most powerful engines ever built.
SpaceX has some experience as the Merlin is already one of the most mass-produced engines, but its simpler and they never attempted to push the production quite to where they want the Raptor to be at.
He is here still talking about the Raptor built in Hawthorne, they are building a new factory to reach the daily rate in Texas: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021/09/raptor-factor-testin...
What I also think is that some people might misunderstand is that this is not about producing a functioning engine, this seems to be really about how fast they manage to do it.
Fans are trying to track these kinds of things:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyEcDQJVoAAF4rB?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E7t5hBjWYBEyeFe?format=jpg&name=...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E7t5h9YXoAcHqxK?format=jpg&name=...
Here some amazing 3D animations for Raptor to see how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCwN00ozWa8
---------------------------------------------------
Edit:
For something totally different, the biggest issue with launching Starship 2x per week is that they literally have no place to do that from. Even if the get approval in Boca, that's for 12 launches a year. Getting more then that might not be very easy.
The launch platforms from the ocean will likely not be ready.
The might be able to launch more from the Cape, but that is also quite contested. And they would have to duplicate the mechazilla launch infrastructure there as well.
I really hope the planning they are doing are not that tight. I can see how mass production of Starlink Sats could really bad a very tough cash burn if you can't launch them.
All that said I don't think its like SpaceX will fail anytime soon.
Edit 2:
SpaceX e-mails usually are not leaked so seeing this is quite surprising. I hope this is not a fake. It seem like it makes sense.
More likely, Boeing.
Raptor problems aren't even what most people would have guessed are the biggest risk, there are several things about Starship that could be considered harder. They mentioned the tile problem but there's also catching the booster, re-entry, reliably doing the flip maneuver, weight gain, etc.
Morty Smith
- Rick
Remember TARP and GM?
I think the government even made a profit on the Tesla loan didn't it?
Clearly he is making a large difference in making us a space faring world
Generally, this fits into Musk's repeated claims that the hard thing about Starship isn't to build a prototype or two, but to make a rocket factory, capable of churning hundreds of launchers a year.
Raptors being the bottlenecks isn't that surprising. They have been developed fairly recently, do not contain many off-the-shelf components (if any) and given that there are ~ 30 of them on the booster alone, they should be manufactured by the hundreds too.
Compared to the Raptors, the other technological learning curves that must be overcome before Starship flies regularly are much less steep. Steel welding, flight software, heat shields - all of these scale reasonably well from the (already flown) prototypes and build upon a long technological tradition.