The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley
ft.com
ft.com
"The other half of the MS model is data centres. “Orbital compute deployments” start in 2028, reach cost parity with their earthbound equivalents by 2031, and put 364GW of rigs in space by 2040."
Also, from other statements they're clearly copying Alphabet's study which said cost parity in 2035, if they can actually launch 370,000 tons and maintain their learning rate.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468
"A $668bn funding obligation to 2034 that delivers free cash flow that year of negative $48bn sounds less than ideal, though FCF might flip positive to $138bn in 2035 if everything goes to plan, so that’s nice. The SpaceX CEO presumably has a long history of delivering products on time and to the required specification that can support such confidence."
"Helium-3 is one of the clearest examples of why lunar infrastructure could matter. The isotope is extremely rare on Earth, with current supply largely tied to tritium decay, but the Moon has accumulated helium-3 for billions of years because it lacks Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. NASA mining concepts often assume concentrations around 20 parts per billion, meaning helium-3 is abundant in total but painfully diffuse, requiring hundreds of tons of regolith to be mined and heated to recover small quantities."
(I have not yet formed an opinion about non-fusion uses for He3).
> Cooling would be achieved through a thermal sys- tem of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures.
Isn't that drastically underselling potentially one of the harder parts of this whole endeavor?
Everything in space is hard; but these are Alphabet researchers not NASA researchers, and honestly even the NASA papers I've been skimming through have a lot of simplifying assumptions in them, so that's not something to hold against them here.
They are just saying when they think it's worth considering, after all, not giving a detailed all-aspect proposal for how to make one.
Scaling that to the hundreds of GW range is quite laughable.
While I'd suspect the design is still in flux, the current design is for a 120kw satellite with 110 square meters of radiators. Scaling to hundreds of gigawatts is intended to be by repeatedly launching smaller designs.
It's ridiculous anyway you cut it, it's a pipe dream.
Like I said higher up, at this scale, if you want to make your own fantasy plan you can draw a contiguous ring filling a single orbit.
Now if we are talking about thousands or millions you have some real questions. Well cost was question to start with. But at millions satellites yeah there is clear issues.
Simple rule for numbers 1 gigawatt is 1 000 megawatts or 1 000 000 kilowatts... So math is pretty simple there in estimations.
The idea that it makes sense to use moon based He3 compared to using thorium that is already mined in waste quantities is absurd. Thorium is free energy already and the machine that turns it into energy is simpler the any fusion reactor we can come up with.
> I sat out the TMT bubble until they quit using the term "information superhighway," and it saved me an 80% drawdown.
> I'm sitting out the AI / chip / SpaceX [AICSX, pronounced like the wrestling shoes?] bubble until they stop using the word "compute" as if it were a noun.
> I'm guessing I'll save myself a drawdown on a similar scale.
A comment under the original article.
That’s a bit silly, since it is a noun at this point, meaning computing resources or computing capacity.
It’s nowhere near being a term similar to “information superhighway”, which was never a technical term used within the industry, it was purely used in communication mostly to the public or in government agency and contractor slide decks.
As opposed, I suppose, to the library. Which is perhaps more like an information bike lane. (Or a pedestrian walkway?)
"Morgan Stanley’s sum-of-the-parts analysis tells a more nuanced story. The “Space” segment, which encompasses Falcon rockets, Dragon capsules, and the Starship program, has been bleeding money. Heavy investment in Starship development drove operating losses in that division, even as SpaceX overall reported a profit of around $8 billion on revenues between $15 and $16 billion in 2025"
Space is cool to nerds like me, but what do I really need from it? I've got all the navigation satellites I could want (which I don't pay for) and the best satellite imagery I use is still hyperspectral airborne imagery.
Now, of course that's not the full story but the use cases get rather specific beyond that: the launch market just isn't actually very big (afaik $30 billion a year).
Just because launch costs were high and these weren't viable before, doesn't mean they won't be viable now.
For pharma, its not universally true. There are few things that can be done better in space, but by far not everything. Research in space makes more sense then actual production. Again even the best case is hard to see how its going to justify the valuation.
> And I bet there are hundreds of other examples.
Hundreds of other even more half baked examples. You need to account for launch cost, space constraints, space environment, landing and recovery. We have been doing this for 40 years and the medicine and fiber are things that have been talked about for 30 years at least.
You're talking about achieving highly marginal gains in product quality at the expense of having to launch into space literally every single part of the production process and recover it from space.
Which includes things like "ruggedizing what you launch so it can survive the launch" and "also ruggedizing it to survive the landing".
Those seem like classic examples of what you get when you have a solution in search of problems.
What’s the monetary value of the incremental improvements in those products, and how does it compare to the cost of setting up and operating manufacturing facilities in orbit?
"Starting with the reusable rockets, MS expects SpaceX to eat itself. Launch costs will collapse by more than 99 per cent versus their historical average within 10 years, it says. Operating margin on launches will have jumped to about 40 per cent, from around negative 50 per cent currently, but 40 per cent of less than 1 per cent still isn’t very much."
There is literally no competition worth speaking of, and nobody to provide downward price pressure. SpaceX started moving into their own constellations because lower prices open up new markets, and this lets them access those markets without having to lower launch prices.
And if you think, as Morgan Stanley seems to, that the only money to be made in space is selling launch of earth orbiting satellites, you’re going to miss out on the boom that is going to make the first quadrillionaire.
When your whole pitch is that you're commoditising a technology, don't be surprised when you get a commoditised market.
SpaceX and NVIDIA share this trait. They out-innovate, and know only one speed: the speed of light. The tortoise can only beat the hare if the hare takes a nap, and nobody is napping at SpaceX.
I’m not a fanboy. I have criticisms of SpaceX. But you are pattern matching to the common story of startups getting complacent and being surpassed by up-comers in China and elsewhere. But the innovators dilemma only applies if the innovator stops innovating. Two decades on, SoaceX is still innovating as much as they always have.
That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so.
In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use has not yet had one circularised orbit.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but at this point Starship development is currently going slower than both the historical analogs, the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle.
Throwing cheap rockets into the air until they don't explode worked fine for Falcon; but given how long it's taking, I'm not sure it's working okay for Starship, and I'm now completely convinced that this is a *terrible* way to make something that's supposed to land on Mars, refuel, and return.
Turned out not, and also that handling re-entry was much much harder than the Space Shuttle (and Buran) had made it seem.
Is this category of launch vehicle just that hard, or did Musk aggravate just enough of the competent engineers and lose just enough talent to grab defeat from the jaws of victory? Timeline's about right for the latter, but I could easily believe the former.
On re-entry, Buran re-entered once. You can’t read much into that. The shuttle did about a hundred times, but exploded doing it once and had a number of near misses. One reason it was killed off was that making re-entry safe was considered to be impossible. I think it’d be fair to say that re-entry for large objects remains an unsolved problem.
China is going to eat them, just like they ate Teslas insurmountable lead in a few short years.
The best selling EV brand in the world is BYD: https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03...
The best selling EV model in the world is the Model Y.
Saying "Oh but the Model Y" is like how when the original iMac came out, Apple turned out to be selling the single most popular model of retail PC in the US despite Apple also having 3% of the world market. Putting a lot of wood behind few arrows does make those arrows look bigger.
I can say that about Tesla. Like, 1/3rd of their total lifetime net profit has been subsidies of one kind or another, mostly government-created regulatory credit programs.
> What is Tesla's Market Cap vs these companies?
Irrelevant, especially as the narrative being used to prop up the market cap this year is "we're not a car company, we're an AI company".
> then you should be shorting Tesla with all you might.
"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
What I have done is sell all my Tesla shares and put them into other things where I see realistic growth opportunity.
That way I don't need to time things perfectly for a relatively small reward (100% if they go bankrupt, vs several times better than that just by simply buying NVIDIA and watching line go up) that comes with successful shorting.
What’s the number of Teslas sold per year? Declining year over year as others have grown significantly. Profit margin sans regulatory issues? Peaked 2021, declining since then. Same in about every company wide metric.
BYD? Most all such metrics over the same period doubled to quadrupled. They outsell Tesla. They have better tech than Tesla. They’re clearly out innovating and outselling Tesla.
And, as the other poster made clear, your moving-the-goalposts let’s-ignore-the-rest claim doesn’t even stand slight scrutiny. Try harder indeed.
Could be relevant if that whole "robot army" happens.
(There were a few of them. Fortunately it did not really survive as a concept)
But of course this is all dwarfed by AI stuff financially so its basically irrelevant. SpaceX could stop all launch sales tomorrow with zero impact on its financials.
How far ahead is SpaceX compared to the competition, a decade? More? Less? Is the gap closing or growing?
> Their actual profit margin for launch of F9 is 62% - 80% depending on configuration. That is a margin unheard of in aerospace.
Do you expect they maintain these margins on launch and whatever services they deliver from space as that gap is closing? Is their first mover advantage practically unassailable because it's in space? Tesla built the EV market and are having their lunch eaten by the competition.
Why? Logically it would seem that learning how to do something that's already been done would be easier than discovering it. SpaceX has already done a lot of the work and has shown the others that it's possible and how they do it. Why won't the others catch up? I can't think of any industry that has a market leader that only gets further away from their competition forever.
You're on Hacker News and you can't think of silicon fabrication? What brand new players do you think are about to catch up to TSMC or Samsung? Or what about advanced jet turbine engines, why is China still having such trouble matching the performance of existing leaders after decades of work? Or operating systems, it's been Apple, BSD, Google, Linux, and Microsoft (or derivatives of these) for a long time. Or web browser engined. Or...
Some things are just really hard and involve enormous amounts of specifics, sunk costs and so on. Even if you know it's possible the implementation is everything, the idea that everything is trivially RE'd/cloned seems to have its limits in the real world.
Ugh... past performance doesn't predict future performance. Why do you think that SpaceX's or ASML's advantages cannot be overcome by competitors? Some are very motivated and will not hold back from any method to get any industrial secrets from the current leaders. If one person can think of it, so can another, eventually.
A decade ago Tesla was the king of EVs.
You have a valid point about ecosystems though - that is a rare exception where first movers can keep holding onto their advantage that I hadn't thought of. However, it's not really applicable when talking about a commodity like space launches.
This is reasonable, unless SpaceX is stagnating for a decade there will still be some gap in 10 years too.
> The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller
This is where the reasoning fails me. Unless you're making an unstated assumption about SpaceX or the competitors, why would the gap grow? As soon as there's a decent competitor, SpaceX's margins will get slashed. Their advancement will have to be supported by margins that can only shrink.
Followers can even have an easier time catching up because they have a working model in front of them. The leader has not only to execute but constantly innovate just to maintain a constant lead. The challengers "just" have to execute well because they can copy the leader's innovation until they catch up. And some of the competitors are more than willing and capable of extreme measures to copy.
Is there any field where over several decades the gap between the leader and the challengers just grew? It's not my industry but I have the personal impression that your "gap growing forever" opinion will age like milk left in the sun. We'll see.
You keep saying this—you'll have to explain. Very little in the world has ever worked like this—the opposite has generally been the case.
If you want to know the why’s I suggest reading Eric Berger’s two books Liftoff and Reentry.
I was with you up to this point.
Quadrillionaire? Seriously? On species-wide economy of 0.1Q/year? On a timescale short enough that SpaceX remains a coherent entity and you don't have to account for things like the sum-total risk of nuclear war? Or even just of Musk dying of old age given he's 55?
Starship fundamentally changes the game in ways people aren’t paying attention to because it pattern matches to sci-fi. But the economics are real: power and material far beyond what is available on Earth, on many cases at lower marginal price than terrestrial sources, and 1000x to 100000x reserves.
And you think you can access that in 30 years?
That's the problem here. Market valuations for, say, the USA, do not count the entire value of the nickel and iron down to the planet's core.
> Starship fundamentally changes the game in ways people aren’t paying attention to because it pattern matches to sci-fi. But the economics are real: power and material far beyond what is available on Earth, on many cases at lower marginal price than terrestrial sources, and 1000x to 100000x reserves.
No, it doesn't. I've done the maths here. At best, and with a better track record than Musk has actually demonstrated, if we use the USA as a metaphor for a the K2 civilisation Musk talks about with lunar-tiling factories making nothing but data centre satellites (done the maths on that too, that's what it would take and even then be borderline on thermodynamics grounds), Starship can be the Mayflower. Not even the Oregon Trail, certainly not the railroad network.
And fundamentally it isn't coherent to talk about "lower marginal price" when space mining has a TRL of 1 or 2. Might be cheap eventually, but pricing that in right now would be an error of judgment (aside from anything else, the tech to make it cheap may also make stuff here cheaper).
The only way this happens in my lifetime, and I'm younger than Musk, is if someone solves for von Neumann replicators. Which I won't rule out, but Musk hasn't demonstrated any special sauce for this to make me think he'd do it before anyone else.
A quadrillionaire would only need $60 billion or so.
the alternate take here is that even at current prices, falcon 9 is more than capable of completely filling space demand which makes building a >10x bigger vehicle seem kind of dumb
I googled and got the following costs per kg to orbit Falcon approx $3000 / kg Starship (early) $600 / kg Starship (target) $ 100 / kg
If they can achieve the target, it’s transformative. The Chinese will follow the lead and be available for some commercial customers but the majority of the market will be SpaceX.
But unless there's demand for launching a lot more stuff, that's not going to help them make a lot of money.
I can buy into a vision of several competing Starlink-like constellations. Can't buy into one about space-based data centres. And we need a lot more demonstrations of space colony precursor tech before I'm going to even have a strong opinion about the economics of space colonies*, either for or against: they're technically feasible, but so too is one on the sea floor, or the middle of Antarctica; and there's people who already build homes for themselves in the middle of the Sahara and at high altitude on mountains, but these aren't *huge* money-makers, just standard boring ones.
* they are cool though; if Musk had actually delivered on the Mars flights that were supposed to have already arrived two years ago, and also not turned out to be who he turned out to be, I'd have considered being an early Martian: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/01/elon-musk-says-spacex-will...
I don't follow this closely, just look at the pretty pictures. If there's demand for lifting much bigger/heavier things to orbit than presently possible, I would probably not know, for lack of pretty pictures. So please tell.
Launch vehicles have always been the cheap part in going to space. Payloads tend to be more expensive, and the actual value is in the services enabled by the payloads.
The reason payloads are expensive is because launch was expensive. If you're paying $10k/kg to launch your satellite you have to make sure it has a 99.9999999% chance of working when it gets to orbit. But if you lived in a world where you pay $10/kg for that same launch and could schedule another launch the next day to replace a payload that didn't work, your satellite would be much cheaper because you could afford to have it fail.
It would also be cheaper because you could afford more standardization. You could afford to use a standard bus, for example, even if it makes your satellite heavier than it needs to be.
There's a virtuous circle here. Cheaper launches mean cheaper satellites, and cheaper satellites mean more launches as previously un-economic activities start to pencil out.
Or you could look at this from another perspective. The services enabled by infrastructure must be more valuable than the infrastructure itself to justify the investment.
Any day now. Yep, real soon, honest!
Starship has so much innovation in there, the raptors itself etc.
It launches, it flies, it re-enters and it lands. The engines work. The heat protection work. Even when they push it to the limits by intentionally experimenting with different heat protection, omitting tiles etc. Even when they are in R&D stage.
I believe they can make it work with little refurbishment between flights. Even if all didn't work like they planned, they still have a very, very good vehicle.
I mean something must go off the rails very very badly for the Starship NOT to enter the service.
The whole AI/orbital datacentres/launch thing is a giant grift.
2025 report https://spacedaily.com/t-spacex-launched-165-falcon-9-rocket...
123 Starlink / 42 commercial. Almost 1 commercial launch per week. I don't think any other launcher does 42 launches per year apart from china.
And the way F9 enabled Starlink is spectacular - a money printing machine on itself for SpaceX.
How many of the HODLers will be SpaceX believers, vs. Musk believers? Musk's already only narrowly avoided being banned from running publicly traded companies from the $420 tweet years back.
Ah. There it is. Even if that's all done as investment-grade debt (with a 50 bp underwriting spread), that's $3+ billion of banking fees.