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Comment by Recurecur | Hacker News Reader

The stock market is not about current results, it’s about future results.

SpaceX has more future upside than any company I can think of…

If you were looking for future upside in space, you will face the same disappointment that everyone enthusiastic about space manufacturing has had for four decades now. Space manufacturing is even in the SpaceX S-1. They're really scraping the bottom of the hype barrel.

Nobody is making a profit in space. Not even Starlink. Once you add in the costs of sustaining their constellation, it barely scrapes by into profitability by underestimating launch costs and an over optimistic projection of future costs.

Starlink can't serve more than a small fraction of an urban population because each bird has a pretty low capacity limit, and terrestrial wireless keeps chipping away at their TAM out in the countryside. Terrestrial wireless infrastructure has a track record of declining costs. The rate at which it eats up the customers Starlink is counting on accelerates.

How? The total market for space flight is low. Satellite internet is nice but again small. Is this just all grok?

The total market size might be low this year or the next. But, for better or worse, humans will continue to push into the unknown.

Reusable rockets will change the economics of space travel beyond recognition. Jevon’s paradox will strike hard and fast. Starlink is the initial proof of this.

Maybe Starship will be the first to achieve the fabled dream of rapid reusability. Maybe not. Either way, it’s a tractable engineering problem at this point and the path has been made pretty clear.

I have no idea what the valuation of SpaceX should be. But, in general, I’d bet a lot on the launch industry growing enormously in the coming decades.

The increasing amount of space debris will likely change the economics of getting satellites into space and keeping them there. The more junk there is, the more likely that it's going to hit something and create yet more debris.

Starlink is growing. Valuation is too high, but it is growing.

"Growing" and "more future upside than any other company" are very different things.

The stock market is not about future results, it's about gambling, especially over the last decade.

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