I reckon I'm one of the few on this forum that doesn't hold SpaceX stock.
I don't think the poster your replying to is saying that, nor do I think the market is headed in that direction. Currently, SpaceX has the only crew certified transport aside from Russia's Soyuz capsule for transport to ISS. That is likely to change in the next two years as Blue Origin continue their certification process and NASA's SLS gets closer to launch (whether or not SLS is a good decision is a totally separate conversation). The more options, the better.
> I reckon I'm one of the few on this forum that doesn't hold SpaceX stock.
I reckon there are only a few that do actually hold SpaceX stock, given the fact they are a private company with limited investment opportunities for the common person.
Do you mean Boeing? Blue Origin aren't competing for commercial crew, and haven't even managed an unmanned orbital flight.
Probably because it's a dumb strawman you've created to knock down. Strawmen do indeed tend to be hard to understand since they aren't actually real. There is no "thirst" to see a private company monopolizing space travel per se. What people are thirsty for is serious, cheap, effective, ambitious space travel in turn leading to serious space development and humanity (and life in general) moving beyond the cradle permanently. The irritation with government agencies is a matter of brutal raw fact: they have failed miserably at this, and they're getting WORSE, not better. Debacles like the SLS or Shuttle. Zero effort to drive down cost, rather the reverse with space being treated as a very shitty bit of pork. I don't even want to say "jobs program" because SpaceX and co will generate WAY more jobs via space development in the long term, but long term thinking isn't very fashionable in much of government anymore. Or at least not in this sphere.
Everyone interested in space would be delighted at more competitive players. And there are indeed a number that might manage it alongside SpaceX, eventually. Smaller players like Rocket Lab are in fact launching for real cargo to orbit, and have reasonable plans to scale up. There is certainly room for another provider or two. But NASA, ESA, Russian, and other government efforts aren't even trying to go there yet and show no potential to do so. They are stupendously wasteful cash blackholes, which is coming directly out of money that could be doing awesome stuff. Awesome good government stuff even, the kind of blue sky research and infrastructure work that governments can do to really blaze the way and help industry. The billions being sunk worthlessly into SLS could be funding a true space station/shipyard/depot [0] designed around the capabilities of Starship, helping to further accelerate smaller hungry players with the capital they need to get into the medium-lift aspect, not to mention a lot of great science.
You're confusing dislike for the gross waste and failures of old fat players and excitement with the incredible efforts and progress of young ambitious new players with some sort of silly "monopoly" thing. Try to research and think about things you don't actually know much about or follow yourself a bit more before forming an opinion perhaps?
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0: Including helping to figure out standards so that fuel depots can be used by multiple players fairly.
SpaceX can turn to private investment and there are a lot of people willing to buy what they are selling. And SpaceX is incredibly innovative and a stratetic asset for the US so they will not let it sink. Sometimes, the utility of something is much more than the immediate economic calculation.
Given his net worth right now, he could very likely carry SpaceX through some economic trouble, but in the event of a big enough downturn, his net worth will probably drop hard due to it being mostly Tesla stock, thus his concern.
Getting things done != leadership.
Lots of people will be paying attention.
"The white bird rose up once again, laser cannon in its wings. It was a moving sight. In my heart, though, I wished it didn't have to be used in war."
>With the highest level person at SpaceX worried about them going bankrupt
Um, no. That statement got very, very confused in the media and retellings. The "bankruptcy" has to do with SpaceX's ultimate Mars ambitions and the rapid viability of Starlink without further investment. Very correctly, Musk and everyone else at SpaceX wants it to be able to stand on its own two feet as fast as possible, and further be able to be printing enough money to fund the enormously long term and capital intensive vision of Mars development. That is the point of it after all, and ultimately that must happen for it all to work. However, that's not the same thing at all as saying that it won't actually be getting further funding. Musk has tens of billions worth of Tesla, a bunch of which he liquidated last year. He will indeed continue to pour money into it. The number of private investors who'd be happy to add in is not exactly tiny either, nor the public for that matter though both those of course bring some challenges around control and overhead.
But that message was a rally-the-troops kind of thing, in stark contrast to Blue Origin for example. Musk doesn't want employees to think of SpaceX as a government too-big-too-fail contractor on safe cost-plus financing simply because it's backed by someone wealthy and dedicated. SpaceX's vision is too big even for him by itself. It needs to be a viable enterprise. It needs to stay hungry and fast even though it has earned the top spot in the current launch market, because they want to obsolete the current launch market entirely while expanding it by orders of magnitude. Starship (and future even bigger ships) has to work for all this, and for Starlink to work economically and help kick off the planned virtuous circle. And Musk is correct that the environment may turn hostile in unpredictable ways so who knows how many years SpaceX actually has to prove itself and really get bootstrapping.
But it's still in a stupendously better position than the ESA, which isn't aiming humanity for the stars in the first place right now with Ariane.
So all that said:
>their own launch systems an capability
This is certainly fine and yes I think it matters strategically. While I don't agree with much of what the EU has done, I also think much of it is wonderful and that fundamentally it's a great institution as well as Europe as a whole. Any entity on that scale should have a route to space in the future, just as the EU has Airbus for flight. And that will help the US as well.
But the way to go about that isn't through Arianespace. The EU, yesterday (a decade or more ago in fact), needs to get their own commercial sector going. With proven examples they can go much faster than NASA did if they want. But they need to supply the vision, big incentives, cut regulatory obstacles, and provide good government infra support and so on then let private players work out the actual implementation servicing those goals.
I disagree. Statements like this "“We face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year” sent of a holiday demonstrate a level on strangeness that really worries people launching very expensive space hardware.
It is hard to understand what he will say / do next and the gulf between what he says and what he does seems to be growing over the past year.
I think you're seriously exaggerating the "gulf between what he says and does". He's always been the type to be extremely focused on the smallest of risks.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/30/elon-musk-warning-not-first-...
His statements regarding subsidies being wrong / government interference in the market as contrasted to how actively Tesla searches for and applies for subsidies.
I personally have an issue with those who think that burning the bridge that helped them get where they are so others can't use it is the correct thing to do.
If he was always focused on the smallest of risks he would not have smoked a joint on camera while working to launch national security payloads for the NRO and DoD. It was just a very short sighted thing for him to do.
You misunderstand. The "thirst" is for a private company making space travel cheaper than ever before. Also before SpaceX came along the US launch industry was basically in the position of the current European space industry. A single old decrepit launch company with overpriced rockets.
ESA is basically open to partnering with them, there is a statement somewhere about them looking into reusable systems. It's politically tricky because part of ESA'S remit is to contract with member states and increase capacity in Europe: you buy into ESA, ESA throws you bones in the form of tender opportunities. I believe it's also reasonably fair, so they make sure that contracts go to everyone.
That also means that most of the big ticket contracts go to companies like Airbus and Ariannespace. Airbus would lobby pretty hard if ESA started spending big money in the US. Though you can see how that worked out for Boeing. A lot of these contracts are big and multiyear, projects using specific launch partners are designed around fairing capacities and so on. We don't necessarily need roscosmos for a lot of this, plenty of launches are done using Ariane rockets from Kourou.
SpaceX isn't publicly listed so the vast majority of people here don't own any. It's not like TSLA.
Finally on monopolies - ESA already doesn't really build much itself, most of the hardware is built by private companies. NASA is the same, though they have a bit more in house capacity than ESA. Apollo and the Space Shuttle were spread out to a huge number of US contractors (people like Lockheed Martin, Rockwell and Northrop Grumman). Orion/SLS? Not built by NASA, built by boeing, rocketdyne and others.
SpaceX has had remarkable success precisely because they disrupted existing launch platforms that were failing to innovate fast enough. In a monopoly, users don't have choice which is not the case here - there's Blue Origin, ULA, Ariane, etc.
Are there really that many people that buy individual stocks like this? I have a 401k, but I have no idea what stocks were purchased with my money.
Of course ESA has Ariane but it's not cost competitive.
They have marketing that's proven to be especially effective on software engineers.