SpaceX Tender Offer Said to Value Company at Record $210B
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
So, roughly, to ensure Falcon-9 flies a lot, SpaceX invented Starlink which could use a lot of flights. Now they have a well-functioning rocket company - 2-3 second stages built per week, and ocassional first stage - and the Starlink, which is already in black.
Now they use the money to get Starship flying, and in 1-3 years they'll likely get it to fly well enough. And they'll have the question what to do with that huge capacity, so they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights. Could it be a significant Moon base, for tourism, science, manufacturing, resource utilization?
How much SpaceX as a company will cost then?
Full surrounding history at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink
It doesn’t make sense to claim “Starlink is profitable” if the underlying rockets still lose money and you don’t account for that in the claim.
> they'll have to invent something which needs a lot of super-heavy launcher flights
Losing money with your expensive solution? Easy, just invent a profitable problem.
More space science and exploration is nice. We'd get more for less. But I don't think space exploration budgets will increase?
Sure. And nobody predicted how incredibly useful the transcontinental railroad would be.
"Nothing Like It In The World" by Stephen Ambrose
https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Like-World-Transcontinental-1...
While I agree that there will be payloads built specifically for Starship's massive capacity, most aren't going to need that much space.
Historically, an entity (company, academia, government) that wants to launch a satellite has had to not only buy/build it, but also buy the rocket, then wait months/years for launch. Some small satellites have been able to hitch a ride on launches of larger payloads, but even there the timing is out of the smallsat's owner's control.
With Starship, an entity only has to build a satellite. As it nears completion, the entity will go to spacex.com, find a day with a Starship launch with sufficient open capacity, and reserve a slot. If the satellite is delayed, the reservation can be moved to another day (perhaps with some percentage of the deposit withheld if too close to launch time). In other words, Expedia for space.
There will be as many Starship launches as needed. Maybe the combined Starlink+outside customer demand will at first result in one launch a week (less frequent than Falcon 9's launch cadence, because of Starship's greater capacity). Maybe over time it will rise to two, three, five, seven, ten, 20 weekly. The more frequent and more consistent the launch cadence, the more confident customers will be that a launch slot will be available when they want one.
But which isn't the business people think it is.
It is making the majority of its revenue from populated areas in wealthy countries [1].
Making it very susceptible to the improvements in the rollout of fibre which is happening in most countries. For example in Australia they are upgrading our fibre network to 1Gbps which is 10x the speed of Starlink.
[1]: https://www.satellitetoday.com/finance/2024/05/09/starlink-o...
I don't know of anyone using Starlink in areas with fibre, only rural areas with no fibre.
And you only need to lay fibre once and you can benefit at least for the next century if not longer as we continue to invent new ways to multiplex data.
Starlink was designed for your parents, and everyone else in that situation.
GP was saying that fiber is coming to all rural areas though, so I was wondering if there was any truth to it.
Personally I think anywhere that has copper right now (and my parents do have an old crusty POTS line running to their home) should be built up to fiber - if we could do it before we should be able to do it again.
What? Thats simply not true at all. I'm guessing you don't live in Australia, or you'd realize how much rural area there is, and how ridiculous that sounds.
What is actually happening is some areas previously served by FTTN (fiber to the node) or FTTC (fiber to the curb) or other, older technologies such as coax are being upgraded to FTTP (fiber to the premise), but there are around 500,000 Australian homes and businesses served by fixed wireless (4g) and around 400,000 additional homes and businesses only served by satellite.
I am willing to be corrected, but I have not heard of any plans for the NBN to upgrade anybody currently using a wireless/statellite connection to fiber.
The intention has always been to upgrade everyone to fibre but there is obviously a question of budget and priorities. So in the interim they will continue to align the technologies on speed as best as they can.
But you can skip the queue so to speak if you're willing to pay for it:
I also wouldn’t be betting on US terrestrial internet providers to outcompete anything.
But they did run fibre through all of the regional towns in WA.
https://www.nbnco.com.au/blog/the-nbn-project/overcoming-rol...
5G is much more likely. It’s just too cost prohibitive to bring fiber to most rural areas.
Mars. Their reason (and market) for Starship is Mars.
Purpose is purely subjective. You could have said the same thing about the ISS before it was built but it has been invaluable.
Secondly and more importantly, we don't have the robotics knowledge to do arbitrary construction projects in this way. Digging through frozen rocky terrain in the extreme conditions of Mars is not easy, and we don't even do that autonomous here on Earth. The Mars Rovers are at the forefront of technology in this area, and they can just about move over the rocky terrain.
And of course, sending people there to operate the machines without first having a shelter is not an option, they will likely die of radiation poisoning long before they finish the project - the thin metal walls of a rocket are not a good radiation insulator.
Will an inn called Mars do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Twardowski#Legend
I think we see it time and time again, the steam engine, the internet, when you create something that enables radically new possibilities, people find ways to put them to profitable uses. The people inventing them have vision, they have ideas about what they could be used for, but ultimately nobody can predict how things will be used. We will probably be pleasantly surprised by the ways people are going to use mass scale space travel.
And a few dozen people living in a high tech cave is not a market.
If this seems crazy to you, well you’re just not in the target market.
2. Trips will be two-way with an included but unscheduled return ticket. Orbital dynamics make this not expensive to do. People who take advantage of that and who got part of their trip out on credit would find themselves deeply burdened in debt, but survivable. The gamble being made (and hedged with insurance) is that most colonists would stay.
3. “and die on Mars” can be literally interpreted as old age, but given the aggressive responses in this thread the underlying assumption I believed was that they’d die from lack of food/water/air, too much radiation, life support failure, etc. in other words the “mars is harder than you think and the colonists will die” tired assumption. In reality ISS research has demonstrated what is required to keep humans alive and healthy, and literal decades of preparation has been done on designs for early bases that exploit local resources to reduce external dependency.
If you’re actually interested in this, Zubrin’s The Case for Space is a good introduction.
When life was hard and the prospect of getting to new land on a frontier to potentially improve your (and most of the time your family's) life, it gave people very potential tangible benefits to go there against the risks.
Going to Mars, a deserted place where living a bare life is only ever possible if a lot of life support infrastructure in small pods is running 24/7 without a hitch. Where there is no direct benefit in terms of human accumulation, not at least for a few generations.
Which millionaire living a good life on Earth would consciously choose living in a cramped pod with strangers for the rest of their life, to look out onto a Red Desert of nothingness every day?
The novelty of doing a short walk around will disappear fast, the motivation of "let's build a city here" would be 100% dependent on the provisions sent by Earth, and there would be no end in sight for your life in little pods while you toil away Martian soil, lose muscles, have to consume a diet of potatoes, while at any time if your life support systems fail you and everyone else you might bonded with are done.
Explorers without much to lose on Earth might embark on this, millionaires living a cushy life not so much.
You are attacking an argument I didn't make, my argument is that the people who possess enough to be the ones paying for a one-ticket to Mars are much less inclined to go live under those conditions. You are going to need a lot of people if you want to transform a barren planet.
And however this may be achieved, it definitely doesn't require humans living on Mars to do it. In fact, it is almost certainly going to only be possible if you don't have people there already, with life support systems adapted to the old status quo.
I don't see how you expect it to be accomplished remotely though, without people on-site to build things, repair things, and most importantly create and expand local infrastructure so as to not need imports from Earth.
It's not "well studied", there are a few studies on how it might be accomplished but all of it is unproven and untested, no one has ever done anything close to terraforming a planet, reality has a pesky way of getting in the way of untested proposals.
Even if we somehow fixed Mars' atmosphere (extremely difficult, but there are at least some ideas), we won't fix anything else. Mars is much farther away from the Sun, so it's always going to be much colder, whatever else happens to it. And it's covered in toxic dust and barren rock, that there is no realistic way to convert to livable useful soil. We should probably first "terraform" the deserts of Earth, as it will have much more value, and would be a good test. And of course, Mars has nowhere near enough water to sustain a significant human population + industry (the whole quantity of water ice is estimated to be similar to the great lakes). And most likely there is no natural water cycle that works at a human scale, due to the distinct lack of massive oceans.
And related to the remote part: robots.
I don’t get mad that there are companies targeting niches that don’t involve me. But when SpaceX does it…
The exact same phenomenon is happening with Mars. People like the idea of it, it's a wonderful fantasy. The new frontier, exploration, etc. None of them truly understand the hardships and ugliness of a life on Mars. It's not a life of exploration, it's a life of living in a small basement and obsessively checking a hundred different life support systems that will kill you if even one fails.
Also, every time one of these Mars fandoms went beyond posting on forums and meeting and speaking about it, they showed just how silly their ideas are. They have no idea of logistics, of limitations of construction equipment, of the difficulty of operating it even in good conditions, of how many things break down with dust, of how much water construction needs, of economics and fundraising for such a project, and so many other problems that are already known - not even discussing the unknowns.
If anyone truly planned to have a colony on Mars, they would obviously start with a colony project somewhere in the Arctic/Antarctic, importing the digging equipment, importing all the needed water, using exclusively solar energy and so on. They could use the experience as training, but, much more importantly, to actually estimate the required equipment and materials. They would start a relationship with regulatory agencies and suppliers, they would get a taste of the type of fundraising they need to do. If they succeeded, they would also have excellent proof that they know what they're doing, of a realistic time-line, and so on.
The fact that no one is even talking about starting something like this is 100% clear proof to me that there is no serious thought being put into this Mars colony fantasy.
you can launch a rocket from anywhere on earth to arrive anywhere on earth in under 30m. first we'll just have better express package deliveries (oh, and military logistics). but eventually they'll decide it's safe enough for people to ride on and you'll just kiss the Kármán line on your way to and from lunch in Kathmandu
I've heard whispers that SpaceX has a bunch of debt that is collateralized by Tesla stock, if that's true there is clearly a case for margin pressure there.
There is the open question of what SpaceX will do with "all that lift capacity, if you give all earth to orbit contracts to SpaceX it still takes a long time to pay back that investment. Starlink was a good fit for Falcon 9, and murmurs that it is cash flow positive not withstanding, having your finger on "world internet" is cool[1] until the world takes it away from you.
On orbit refueling, which means having a fuel depot in orbit that has active cryo chillers operating to keep fuel for long periods of time, could be that answer since there is nominally "unlimited" demand for fuel in orbit, but the technology to make that work still has a lot of unknown unknowns. (I loved the ULA concept of using fuel boil off to run an internal combustion engine in the fuel depot that did active refrigeration, but that is still untested)
Still, having the only functioning orbital gas station would have even more leverage than having the only world internet. As Exxon et al have shown, you can extract a lot of value from people who can't get their gas anywhere else. Let's say a Starship flight costs $150 million to put 10 tons of cryo-fuel into orbit, can you sell it at $20 M/ton to customers? It only costs $250 - $300 to "make" liquid methane, maybe $200/ton for oxygen. That's some healthy markup and that would definitely make money.
[1] I am a Starlink customer and it has made working remotely from anywhere actually possible, that said if they decide to squeeze really hard that could cease to be the case.
We actually seem to have more and more need in the space-based industry. Not only unique products requiring microgravity to get produced. For example, right now we need a lot of data centers - and those could be placed in space, reducing load on Earth environment and power.
And all of that increase in activity is going to go through Starships initially. SpaceX is in a really unique position. In XIX century nobody thought they'll need to use railroads to travel far and often. But there were many railroad-building companies. Now we have problem figuring out why we need cheap massive access to space. Could it be that we won't find uses for it?
But certainly some monetary easing can generate quite some wealth.
It is very easy to point out how an economy with perfect information and perfect cooperation has zero demand for money, but reality works very differently.
So of course the whole country benefited.
As for some spaniards profiting, of course, it was still feudal, aristocracy profited.
Somehow Europe lost sight of that and the US seems to be on the same path.
Also, gold wasn't used to build things, so it contributes very little to wealth (jewelery and decorations notwithstanding). Having a huge injection of iron or uranium or tritium or helium or lithium or other rare and sought-after elements today would be an entirely different story.
Of course, the whole idea of bringing an asteroid to earth to mine is pure sci-fi at this moment, so this is all moot.
The one thing those asteroids have going for it is that it's already in space - so if you were planning on building a space station, space ship or something of that nature, you might be better off mining in space to produce the materials for it (and save the launch costs, for the one time cost of launching space mining and manufacturing plants).
If I were a betting man, I’d wager SpaceX to be valued more in the long run.
. . . you'd destabilize the world economy, and your trillion-dollar rock would either no longer be a trillion-dollar rock, or else your trillion dollars won't buy nearly as much as it would have before.
I would be willing to bet that SpaceX will be long gone as a company before the first successful (cash-flow positive) asteroid mining operations will begin long in our future. And that it will barely be a memory by the time we start bringing asteroids closer to the earth to mine them, if that ever happens. They will of course have made some serious contributions to this future, but this is waaaaay beyond anything we'll see in our lifetimes, and companies just don't tend to live that long.
Warning: Disappointingly thin, only a single paragraph in total.
I was surprised to learn Bytedance (TikTok) is only valued at $268B.
Remember the last dispute was solved by paying Oracle a lot of money (a bribe) to onshore all of US citizens data... Yet a few years later and suddenly that isn't enough.
Surprised yet at the same time I'm not. Its hard to really understand money at that scale.