Starship is going to be huge when it's finally operational. It seems like it should be worth more than $8/shr if the potential is accounted properly.
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.