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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

If SpaceX is indeed overvalued (which I have no opinion on), it above all else demonstrates how unimportant spaceflight still is.

SpaceX has been the only game in town for quite a while now, to such an extent that the intelligence agencies of foreign governments have no alternative but to launch with SpaceX. They now do more orbital launches than the entire rest of the world combined. If they really are worth less than Microsoft, then it seems space just doesn’t matter that much, because SpaceX is space for all practical purposes.

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I think you are conflating mattering and making money. You can matter a lot, generate a lot of social good and not make money.

This article is just about the making money part.

I think this is right. For example, GPS is tremendously useful, but you can use it for free. Similarly, while there are commercial weather services, a lot of people access the ad-supported versions[0] or get it from their government’s weather agency.

[0]: which obviously provide some revenue, but much less than the value provided.

SpaceX is important to launch and telecom, which are two big space verticals but not all of space.

Further, space is just reaching the point it can really grow.

Space is strategically important but perhaps not as directly economically valuable as Microsoft yet, and SpaceX is just a fraction of that value.

Part of the problem with this argument is that for them to be worth a lot, you need both the amount of stuff launched into space to go up massively and for no one else to be able to build a rocket that's anywhere near as good. Spacex is doing really well now, but if Rocket labs, China, Blue Origin, or anyone else manages to make a rocket that's half as good, spacex needs to maintain a monopoly despite not having anything especially magic.

SpaceX is not being valued based on the space part, it's being valued based on Musk's claim that the market for their AI is the entire GDP of the United States. The space stuff is only estimated as about 1% of their addressable market

Why would space matter, economically?

The real immediate economic value hasn't really changed for decades. Starlink is the most recent significant innovation in that area, and it's worth less than 3% of Google's revenue.

The hyped up reasons for space mattering are all completely speculative and at the limits, stretch the bounds of a sane person's credulity: asteroid mining - ok, there may be an economic case for that, but it's far future; colonies on the Moon and Mars - there's no economic case for those, it's purely a dubious expenditure of tax dollars that has no meaningful economic purpose. Etc.

So, what makes spaceflight "important" beyond what it's already used for and has been used for, for decades?

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