It seems obvious that building an orbital rocket from the ground up and launching thousands of disposable satellites into space just to sell mobile data plans would not be a profitable venture.
But think of the underserved rural African and Asian populations subsisting on $2/day. These people constitute a huge potential user base. They are just itching to spend $120/month on internet access.
Yep, I am in rural area and can't get shit - I was a fan and still am of the technology but no way, living out in bum fuck nowhere, scraping to keep my homestead, am I gonna tie up 500 bucks to BE PUT ON A WAIT LIST.... For a Musk company lol
No, luckily an older millennial like myself who was a native farm boy around here built a company doing line of sight access on cell towers that dot the fields in my area.
They just upgraded to 5g wide band as well, so...
I'd give starlink a shot still but with what I got I get decent speeds and the hardware was free. I just pay monthly and they upped our capabilities for free when they went to wideband.
I've had 2 outages in 5 years. Both were from upgrades or maintenance and only lasted an hour or less.
Well, especially when most of the world that has money already has cell towers and landline based Internet that are both better than satellite Internet or satellite phone for like 99% of consumers.
So yeah or you could just look at subscribers. Musk claim that he'd have over 20 million subscribers years ago and he's got like 2-3 million.
So from my perspective, starship is completely reliant on big government contracts for science and space more or less. Personally, I am fairly confident that the moon and Mars base ideas are not going to work and governments will not be putting enormous amounts of money into either idea.
Humans will value their lives more and more as time passes and technology gets better and there's no solution to the low gravity of the moon and earth, even if you saw all the other problems. Was gravity being such a core property of the universe it's not particularly easy to change And I don't believe humans can live long-term in .3 7G like on Mars and certainly not in like .1 G on the moon.
So basically you're torturing all those poor people just to pretend like we need a base on the moon or Mars. Do you want to send them there to do a little bit of science OK, but that's not gonna be a long-term reoccurring contract that keeps starship in business and if anything we're going to win to shrink the rockets so they're more cost-effective for launching probes, rovers and satellites, but not usually massive bundles of satellites since that's not really that useful.
The gravity aspect of living outside of earth is a huge aspect but space as a whole is completely inhospitable.
The radiation emitted from the sun alone would give any would-be-Martians super cancer on their 2 month journey, and we have absolutely no way of blocking that without taking literal tons of water with us to use as “shielding” (which will never outcompete the magnetosphere)
And that’s just the trip there! Mars itself is covered in poison. It’s covered in microscopic, impossible to remove in an airlock, perchlorates which are toxic to humans, most plants, and as an added bonus; UV radiation breaks down perchlorates into even more toxic materials that evens BACTERIA are having trouble surviving & coping with.
Red rock is not made for man.
Right? Space is for probes, earth is for humans. By all means, lets learn all we can but the idea of colonizing that nightmare hellscape of a planet makes zero sense to me.
I strongly disagree. Space is our destiny. We must eventually reach out to space or we will die a type 1 civilization...at best.
Also, O'Neil cylinders are our best best.
If we can subvert Kessler syndrome, humanity is poised to control and extract all recourses from our solar system in the next thousand years. I have a lot of hope for our species.
It’s however an inescapable truth that we evolved for life on earth, and not for the exotic life of space. We’ll have to make a lot of technological advances if we ever want to live comfortably in the void. Even then it’ll be most likely that we stay planetside and have drones do our dirty works
Even if faster than light travel turns out to be impossible, I feel the human urge to conquer will drive us to send genesis ships to identified habitable exoplanets.
"Space is our destiny" is a slogan. What on Mars makes it worth the giant cost of getting there let alone trying to colonize it. Doesnt it make infinitely more sense to try an clean up this planet than create a new earth in a place that at its warmest is like 10 degrees and lacks a magnetic shield suitable gravity ect. Beyond that getting to other solar systems is probably beyond the resources we have on this planet to accomplish. With current tech it's a 150000 year trip.
There is nothing worth traveling to and colonizing anywhere near our planet. Going to mars is the single stupidest waste of resources our species has ever come up with. So of course Elon is obsessed with it.
Ikr, I think people tend to forget how much on Earth we take for granted. From birds to the goddamn wind. Maybe you don't appreciate now - but you will sure as hell wonder why you left it when it's gone
Especially when number one, we are nowhere near overpopulation of Earth and indeed, modern trends indicate that population growth contains itself with social pressures, no starvation or war even needed. People just stop breeding. All that money is MUCH better spent fixing and protecting Earth. 100 years from now, we'll be colonizing Mars, but not 10 years and not 20 years and anyone with even an ounce of sense knows that.
Call me crazy, and you will:
I honestly think that the reason money flows so effortlessly to space-buses like Starship and the like is that the think tanks have finally convinced the uberwealthy that it's time to get a ticket off, anywhere.
If the climate can be dealt with, there will be a lot of reckoning coming the way of the forces responsible, for generations.
If the climate cannot then the anger and panic will only be able to be controlled for so long before anyone seen as rich or responsible will be hanging from streetlights and power poles.
Musk is their escape plan.
We have almost no data about human physiology in partial gravity. There is plenty of data now on microgravity from the ISS and other extended orbital missions. And, of course, the baseline data at 1G from all of us on earth. The ONLY data points that are between those are exactly 12 men spending an average of 2 days at lunar gravity, and that after being in microgravity and high G environments shortly before.
We have essentially NO idea what the shape of the curve between 0 G and 1 G is. It may be that Mars gravity is perfectly healthy. Or not. We don't know.
When was that projection made? What year did they say they'd have their first customers?
If you adjust it to the first year they had customers does it line up?
I think what we always underestimate is just how much more preferable it is make life better for everyone here and that drive will continue into the future.
Living on the moon, mars etc is cool until you get the reality check that NOTHING is there, no birds, not even a breeze.
I think humanity will still push to build these kind of things as they will be important hypothetically in a few million years, but also due to that fact such ventures will always be relogated to being side projects that are always secondary, (as they should be).
Um there are still dead zones in the us for cell service and starlink is better then alot of land based providers and is def better than any other sat internet provider
The orbital rocket surprised me somewhat. Seems like a good idea to reuse as much of the rocket as possible, even the Shuttle worked that way.
Starlink was always gonna be a flop. Viasat has been trying to get it to work but hasn’t succeeded, and there have been many billionaires that went bankrupt trying to achieve it.
The idea has been around since at least when I was a kid in 1995 and read a news article claiming Bill Gates was putting money in the research. At the time his goal was providing 56k everywhere around the globe but the idea never justified the costs. The Russians were already launching the Soyuz (which still launch for the same cost SpaceX charges)..
Musk basically stole the idea from his customer OneWeb as he was desperate to find a use for his Starship promise (remember the "earth-to-earth transportation" original idea he presented?)
SpaceX profitability is less of a concern than the launch capacity it gives the US and others. If they failed they'd get nationalized, or some similar scheme.
No, SpaceX is doing OK with their smaller rockets, it's a starship that probably doesn't have a lot of good uses even though it costs max amount of money.
I doubt they'd get nationalized, I don't think NASA wants to own a rocket company that's why they've always outsourced the rocket building part even if they were to design the initial thing themselves. They're not going to build a factory and supply chain and all that bullshit.
Instead of the government would just put out contracts for companies to replace the SpaceX rockets more or less just like they have with the space shuttle being replaced, which of course you know like that it actually make the space shuttle rather a whole bunch of private companies and the same goes with the Saturn V rockets, they always outsourced the work so that's what you should always expect.
Satellite Internet isn't commercially viable over direct fiber. Unless maybe you live in Antarctica. Even for rural areas, it's mostly the initial investment of the fiber that is the challenge, which is still cheaper than launching thousands of satellites into space.
SpaceX, I don't know anything about rockets so I'll stay in my lane.
Yea um Comcast is 1 mile away from my neighborhood and wants a million to connect us. Starlink is fine aside from latency for fps games which you can still play. Try running fiber thru the Rockies and get back to me. You obviously know nothing about starlink either
For 99% of the population fiber is better. Launching thousands of satellites for the other 1% isn't commercially viable.
It's the same conversation for power lines. For some customers it's actually cheaper to buy a generator and give them free fuel than it is to hook up and manage power lines. Yet everyone has power lines...
Look, I cannot stand Musk - he’s a piece of shit of the highest order - but SpaceX is important.
Starlink, not so much, that’s nothing new or innovative but SpaceX has made launches routine and the norm. Thankfully Musk is mostly just the cheerleader for SpaceX and the smart people get to do their thing and they get shit done.
SpaceX is MASSIVELY funded by government subsidies/projects and I’d never argue it was a good investment for investors. As a country though, it’s vitally important we have this easy access to space. Easy access to launch & lift tons and tons of whatever we need to get up.
>Starlink, not so much, that’s nothing new or innovative
You don't live remote.
I live on an Alaskan island. We don't have fiber, Hughes net is laughable trash, that costs double for less than 1/5th the speeds and like a 30gb month data cap, only cellphone provider is ATT and covers maybe 1/4 of our island(might be generous), starlink has been a huge success here, and other remote areas. You don't just run fiber hundreds of miles through the ocean and mountains to service 800 people. But launching satellites that can move and service different communities helps all our schools, health clinic, law enforcement response, small business, etc.
I literally have starlink on my boat, I can drop anchor and watch a movie, or call for help. Without starlink, I'm hoping someone someone is on the radio, and can find me. Fiber/other satellite providers don't offer that.
Glad it works for you. Doesn’t change my opinion of it. It’s nothing hugely innovative, they’re just willing to throw A LOT of hardware up there. They can do that thanks to the part I said was vitally important, the launch capability.
I’m not saying starlink is a bad thing or anything and I’m sure some people benefit from it. I’m just skeptical that they can just continuously toss millions of dollars in satellites up there nonstop and repeat that every few years unless they get a lot more subscribers and regardless, I see SpaceX as our way to space; not as an ISP.
They don't need a ton of subscribers if they offer something no one else can and is vitally important. Hence the reason they get a ton of money from the military, and not just the US military. If you want internet in a trench in Ukraine for instance, you don't have many options, starlink provides that, and governments will pay to keep an edge in warfare. No reason their needs a large swath of individuals as subscribers. Lockheed Martin is a huge company, it's not like they have a ton of different customers.
Starlink being available to private citizens is simply a bonus alternative revenue stream.
Innovative is new methods or ideas. I would argue they are Innovative as no other company has ever used the method of launching soo many satellites.
They can only launch soooo many satellites because of their launch business which is hugely subsidized by the US government. Other companies are working on getting satellites up as well and that will bring competition. That can go one of two ways. It can either offer the same service at the same/similar locations and cause the market to charge accordingly or it can go the way every other telco/ISP battle has gone and they artificially keep the prices high and they split the market up. Regardless, it’s still not the point of SpaceX and never will be. They’re not built to be an ISP, that’s a fun little side project for them. Having a communications network established in space is a good thing to have for a company that hopes to launch people into space beyond the ISS.
>They can only launch soooo many satellites because of their launch business which is hugely subsidized by the US government
They were subsidized because they were innovative and the first to start mass launching.
>Other companies are working on getting satellites up as well and that will bring competition
If they get them up, they were not first and won't be getting the same govt funding.
>They’re not built to be an ISP, that’s a fun little side project for them.
I literally said that, it's alternative revenue for them, but they are still being innovative in doing something with a method no other company ever has.
>Having a communications network established in space is a good thing to have for a company that hopes to launch people into space beyond the ISS.
That sounds super innovative unless you know other companies close to sending people into space beyond the ISS?
I am not sure what you are arguing about, you said they were not innovative, but your points say otherwise. They are ahead massively of any competition, and the govt paid for most of it, so has no need to pay other companies to do the same thing.
I agree here, you can say SpaceX is doing nothing new, which is a half truth. What they've done is streamlined the process of launching rockets and has definitely made the industry more competitive. Look at fucking Boeing right now, they have completely fucked up their platform to carry astronauts.
SpaceX did it flawlessly, no one has landed rockets before them, no one has reused rockets like them, no one modernized and simplified vehicle controls like them. The Starship is yet to be seen as a success, but with the latest test it looks to be actually usable. The Falcon 9 platform is becoming really mature. Hell they reflew one booster 21 times, if you know anything about rockets you'd know that's insane for a booster.
This is all assuming Elon the mega dumbass doesn't run this company into the ground. Additionally I think anyone speculating the financials of a private company is an absolute fraud and disingenuous. You just literally don't know.
Yeah, that’s not happening. The fuel needed to keep those lasers and the receivers aligned for every last bit and byte will be enormous over time.
But, if, IF, this does happen, I’ll be right back here to take it back
So I work for an MSP and we offer Starlink to some folks where it makes sense. It's funny to see how fast they've raised their prices and how quickly their speeds have dwindled once people actually start using it.
My dad is deeply convinced that Starlink is the future of telecoms, and I've tried to convince him otherwise, like by pointing out that the rural market or whoever currently isn't being served by telecoms are niche target demos. The problem is I'm basically only guessing about the numbers, and my guesses aren't any more convincing to my dad than his guesses are.
If you have actual numbers I could point to, I would greatly appreciate it. I wanna bring receipts next time I talk to my dad.
Only my personal experience but I am in a rural mountainous area. I have some small name 5g service for home Internet. Not even sure which network it runs on. It's gone down once in the past year. At least that I've noticed, but with kids and working from home, I would notice most day time outages. A friend has Starlink. I wouldn't say it's bad by any means but it seems every other month there is some issue. I'm not switching.
Absolutely for some markets it makes a ton of sense. The problem is the vast majority of the world that can afford starlink lives in urban areas with fiber internet access already.
All these idiots in here talking shit have never used starlink and are clueless. Rual areas have fiber, yea ok. You ever run fiber in the Rockies dipshits? Comcast wants 1 million to run it 1 mile to my neighborhood and im in the freaking mtns. Starlink is the only other option and is outperforms dsl and cable is a ton of markets. I have had mine for 4 years with zero issues.
Yea so your 5g that will get throttled is nowher as good as starlink. Im in the mtns as well and starlink destroys my 5g. Unless you are next to a 5g tower there is no comparison. I would look at starlink again, I stream in 4k, try that on your 5g cell service
Satellite comms are actually a very untapped market with a lot of room for potential profit. I was on Amazons Kuiper project until recently and the numbers they spout are pretty promising….. but I’m also a tech guy and not a finance guy so what do I know
This is obviously an anecdote, but I have a ranch and need to have backup internet when I am working there. So, I have T-mobile wireless and Starlink.
I exclusively use T-mobile unless they have an outage. The data rate is a bit slower, but it feels much faster and is more stable.
It may not be such an amazing thing for civilian comms, but I'm pretty sure the military will pay a bunch of money for it. I had to deal with a lot of military communications in the early 2000's. I don't think most people realize just how much a geostationary sat link sucks. Sending data is like working with early 56K dial-up modems but with far more dropped packets.
If the US government needs high bandwidth, low latency connections to power things like "network warfare," remote control of platforms like B21 (flying without humans), NGAD, and small drones, Starlink is an amazing system.
Geostationary sucks ass!! I had some idiot on here tell me viasat was the same as starlink, um no it's not. One is 22,000 miles from earth while the other is 800 miles. Half the people commenting just hate musk as I do as well, I'm just not an idiot like them
Somebody did a breakdown of it o. YouTube. I think it might have been Adam Something or Thunderbolt. There’s one other super detailed guy out there calling Musk out. He sometimes overstates his argument but I’ve seen worse.
Common Sense Skeptic. That was it. I’m on my phone and it’s late now. But he’s probably got the numbers from a year or two ago broken down. Might be pre-Ukraine though.
Beware of common sense skeptic. The Wall Street part of TSLAQ doesn't like him because he's like Musk - he sounds like he knows what he's talking about but is confidently getting stuff wrong.
He's also a massive Qanon conspiracy theorist.
His numbers are wrong.
He thinks AWS egress prices are what SpaceX pays for transit (you can get 100Gbps for under $100k per year if you shop around) and that SpaceX is paying retail launch prices for starlink.
Once you put reasonable numbers in his model you'll know it's wrong because starlink isn't profitable yet
Starlink offers me 30 down and 10 up minimum for 90$ a month. In low traffic times I see up to 180 down and 20 up. Nobody in my area gets anywhere close to those speeds, and it's cheaper.
So viasat and hughes who have been around forever and were profitable are not viable? Because that's who starlink is stealing customers from. Starlink was just profitable by the way
This isn’t the correct take. He didn’t start those businesses. And the reason they’re still running is because the government told him to get fucked. Now, we have future problems of billionaires like Musk using Starlink to help enemy states…….
I was at a gathering with the president of Port Canaveral, who used to carry the nuclear football for daddy bush. He was a real musk fluffer. He was telling me how great it was that starlink was going to provide internet service to remote areas that never had service before. He stopped talking to me when I asked him how a filly in the Philippines living on $50 a month would be able to afford the $500 dish and $100/mo subscription?
There's several orgs paying for GEO internet today to reach the unreached and mobile tower providers that provide sat service to Telcos and 4G to users.
https://old.reddit.com/r/musked/comments/1dfgx4e/spacex_starlink_is_a_big_money_loser/l8kivrg/
Africa Mobile Networks for example.
And KDDI in Japan
well I for one hope starlink doesn’t fold. We just installed one in a school in the middle of Philippine nowhere and they’re happy to finally have internet in their IT room.
Lmao it’s amazing how few of you have any concept of the world outside your own county 😂. Starlink has completely demolished the entire vsat industry. It is absolutely not a product to displace your Comcast cable modem. Just hilarious.
Actually falcon 9 is EXTREMELY cost effective to launch. The cheapest launch vehicle overall in human history. We have single boosters doing 100+ launches. I'm far from an Elon simp, in fact I won't lie, I fucking hate that guy. But the only good work he's done is his work at SpaceX. We'll see what happens with starship but if it works out that company will be profitable for eternity. It'll be the Amazon of space.
I for one respect SpaceX and its people. They've accomplished more, in less time and for less money than any nation on earth has. All of this in spite of having Elon's borderline personality, petulance, and perversion soaking up all the credit and generally causing chaos.
It's like running a marathon in wooden clogs and winning.
re: Starlink, I work on ships and I can tell you as far as ships around the world there is massive demand for Starlink. It's quickly replacing the entire older system that was mostly in place: INMARSAT to provide high speed data to ships in the middle of the ocean. And it works AMAZING. Can't comment on whether it's profitable or not, but if Starlink went under someone else would take up the slack I'm sure.
SpaceX is profitable for every falcon launch. What isn't profitable is Boeing's Starliner. You're pulling facts from nowhere when launch costs are lower than they have ever been for reusable rockets. A launch cost for any other company is an entire rocket. NASA eats it's own costs when it was dealing with a space shuttle to refurb and the boosters. The shuttle eating most of it due to it being habitable space.
The money maker behind Starlink isn't basic internet services. Its about 30% faster for international communication compared to cable and fiber. That speed is critical for international financial transactions like buying and selling stocks. That's the big money customer.
Launch price ≠ Launch costs.
Musk does a lot of very stupid shit, but lumping Spacex in as a failure with nothing but conjecture isn’t a winning argument.
Musk’s sycophant dicksucker crowd are mostly shareholders. They want him to win because stonks go up, and if they have more money in their wallet they feel justified calling anyone without it a loser. The polar opposite of an unbiased party, and anything they say can and should be dismissed as motivated purely by greed.
It’s still cool that they come back down and land like that. I dislike Musk as much as the next person, but it feels like we can’t appreciate anything these days once it’s politicized. Enjoy the art not the artist kinda thing, I think what Elon’s company, what his engineers did is neat. This is saying nothing about the profitability, ethics, or anything else about space x.
I agree. Too many people here are completely black pill doomers. Landing a 40 story building is incredible from a technical perspective and all of humanity should be celebrating like we did when airplanes were invented. But noooo. Better think of a reason why this is actually a bad thing!
just seems to me, it is much preferable that an American company takes American to the ISS rather than relying on the Russians. but then again, I guess Musk did take away the Left's favorite toy - Twitter - so they gonna hate even if he comes up with a cure for cancer
I am not a fan of musk but starlink is the real deal, it works well at high speeds, also I know tons overlanders, Truckers, and small towns sign up like crazy for star link not excluding all the countries around the world that don’t have speeds like 1st world countries. It will bring down the cost of internet on a mobile platform. I use it every time I am going camping where I have zero cell reception. Remote work has never become so easy
It’s not a bad thing but it’s important to point out it’s unsustainable. Just like everyone enjoys a 1st world lifestyle but there’s not enough resources to provide that to 8 billion people
It’s not perfect and Elon is a tool but his starlink unfortunately will be successful
To give internet to people/places instead of running wires underground or through mountains
I think Elon should go to jail for insider trading and some of his other companies are crap
But starlink isn’t a bad idea
He should just have someone smart running it not Elon insider trading musky pits
He should be getting investigated for the insider trading then investors would be better informed
"Musk's aerospace company SpaceX grew from operating with a net loss on revenue of $1.45 billion in 2019 to [an operating profit of about $3 billion](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/spacex-forecasts-doubling-of-revenue-to-8-billion?rc=k61ljn) on $9 billion in revenue in 2023, according to the Information and [documents viewed by *TechCrunch*](https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/11/internal-pre-starlink-spacex-financials-show-big-spending-on-moonshot-bets/)."
Do people in this sub just blindly believe any bullshit people post.........
I believe his core argument is that if you price starlink launches at public pricing rather than internal costs it won't be profitable in its 5 year cycle
There is a reason why Elon wont take the whole thing public. It's also suspect as hell that he claims to have reduced the cost of getting shit into space by like over 90 percent. It would be like a airline claiming they can get you from NY to Hong Kong for 100 bucks and make money. You can reduce costs in a given field by margins by a 10 fold decrease without some sort of ground breaking new tech is absurd.
A screw sold to the government cost 100× More than it should. And that's not an exaggeration. It wouldn't suprise me if he was comparing 'screw from Home Depot' to 'government screw'. Which would explain the 90% reduction. So no. A better analogy would be it would be like comparing going from NY to HK in a F16 vs a commercial Boeing. That would be where the 90% cost reduction comes from. This would also not require new tech. It's simply pointing out how bloated government spending is. We should hold our politicians more acocutnbale for their spending considering just this year alone, they're adding 6k in dept PER PERSON (man, woman, and child) to our deficit just this year alone. https://www.usdebtclock.org/
You don’t go public unless you have to do so to raise a bunch of money. Going public has terrible consequences for a business like SpaceX that is pushing the limits.
Terrible consequences like no longer being able to effortlessly lie about its financials. If going public so terrible why are almost all the world's largest companies public? Space X is pushing the limits aka putting satellites into orbit like has been done for 60 years albeit at a reduced cost.
> You can reduce costs in a given field by margins by a 10 fold decrease without some sort of ground breaking new tech is absurd.
What do you think rocket reusability is? In your analogy the existing airlines are throwing away every plane after flying it once, while SpaceX is re-using most if the plane and working on re-using 100%.
Also, even without reusability they were already more efficient because of the management style and work culture being totally different to the established companies caught in a cycle of lobbying and cost-plus contracts that incentive inefficiency.
Idk as someone who lives in a rural area, me and all of my neighbors use starlink. It's definitely changed internetvin the boonies for a lot of families. Before starlink, all we had was HughesNet, and that service sucked.
It’s hard to imagine why indigenous peoples throughout the world, few of whom have electricity, aren’t clamoring to sign up for StarLink. Boggles the mind it does.
You would be correct (also, I really dislike Musk), but you are forgetting about the Billions they received from the fed to do all manner of launches. Many we don’t even know the contents of.
For a very different take on the long-term term viability, profitability, and future prospects of SpaceX, here's a video from an Australian military economist.
https://youtu.be/effFp6AnCWo?si=TZeJgp40z2BUCBRG
What are you even talking about? Spacex has dramatically lower the cost of launching rockets. And while spacex wasn't profitable in the past due to research and development cost, it is now profitable in the billions. And if it wasn't for spacex we would still be dependent on Russia for space flights. For people that say starlink is not needed, I'm glad you have access to cheap fast internet, but for many including my self I would not have access to high speed Internet if it wasn't for starlink.
Look at how starlink was used in Ukraine.
Like it or hate it, Starlink is going to be heavily invested in by defense contractors. You can bet your ass on it.
You can also bet other nations like Russia and China will launch their own proliferated low earth orbit networks.
The US has had for years a large network of satellites it utilizes for national defenese. Even if it contracts with starlink does that make up for the civilian internet being a total flop? Probably not. There is a reason spaceX hasn't gone public.
Musk is just a grifter of taxpayer subsidies. No other human has received more direct or indirect subsidies and govt money than musk. His only business that doesn’t steal from the taxpayer is Twitter. That one is down 70%. Coincidence?
Don't bother, they won't get it. Every single aerospace company in the US receives government money. It would be impossible to get into space without our tax funding which would set us back to a point where we would be wondering if getting to the moon is possible. These are the same types of people that want free everything but complain when we invest in companies that advance our civilization and have some of the highest return on investment technology wise than any other sector. Don't believe me? Check out how much of your everyday items and materials used today are the result of the aerospace industry.
A: all rocket companies receive subsidies and will continue to do so
B: the right wing it hates subsidies
C: the United States government extracts from SpaceX a service. A service that no other company in America is able to provide as demonstrated by Boeing this last week.
Why is this such a mystery to people. The company hasn't made it a secret (well, the exact numbers they have ... which isn't a promising sign).... they're operating "at cost". Every launch is a loss.
Of course, they aim to generate profit. But it's yet to be seen. And those who've calculated ranges don't come out with favorable numbers. They'll be lucky to break even.
Plenty of things to be critical of Enron about.... This post is just bs though, Starlink is set to make a profit this year. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/just-5-years-after-its-first-launch-the-starlink-constellation-is-profitable/
There are many other sources that are very doubtful of this, with their own researchers, such as Bloomberg.
To be fair, there's no true way to know without transparency. But if they were truly at the door to profit, they'd be open with the numbers. (Musk always brags)
He still relies on private investors. That's exactly why these launches are made into a spectacle to generatethe next round of funds. Blue Origin and other rocket companies don't need to worry about image or numbers the way SpaceX does.
Blue Origin has yet to have a single successful orbital launch, no one in history has put more tons in space than space x has, that's why you don't hear any hype around Blue Origin.
You are barking up the wrong tree here, falcon 9 is not only the most reliable rocket in history, it also is the cheapest in history.
>SpaceX hasn't really revolutionized anything. Reusable rockets were around prior, and they've always been nearly unprofitable.
Haha dude WTF are you talking about? WHAT reusable rockets? The shuttle? That thing required MONTHS of refurbishment between launches, the oxygen tank is completely expendable, and the solid boosters also required major work between flights. NASA openly admitted that the reusability of the shuttle was not economical, and did not meet the original design promise.
SpaceX is turning around Falcon 9's in DAYS. They have launched 430,000kg of payloads into orbit, the next-highest entity (govt or otherwise) is like 30,000kg. It's insane what they've done
>I just wanted to point this out as fodder against the Musk simps who claim that "at least he made rocket launches far cheaper!".... No. He didn't.
Yeah, he did. How do you not understand that building a brand-new rocket for every launch is way more expensive than re-using a F9 first stage 25 times with almost no refurbishment required?
>Despite claims of positive cash flow, the only way they can be green on paper is by not taking into account launch cost. ... Yes, that's right. A rocket launch company that doesn't include the rocket launch costs. 😆
You are conflating starlink profitability with launch costs/profitability. Logical fallacy. Plus who gives a shit? Putting Starlink in space is a massive capital investment for long term gains. Amazon didn't make money for decades and nobody complains about that shit nowadays.
Yikes. Musk may have lost his mind, overpromised, etc. Space X is the real deal. Tremendous achievement. The best of Boeing, Northrup Grumman and the rest can't touch Space X price and reliability. Great engineering.
Tell me, who had reusable rockets before X? No. Everyone including the Chinese are playing catch up.
It’s fine to hate on Musk, but as someone from the aerospace industry and that happens a to be a SpaceX customer, what you wrote is not the reality. SpaceX revolutionised flights in terms of time to space, costs and ride-sharing options. I’ve worked with ex-SpaceX employees that dreaded Musk but loved the mission, and they’re all really nice, productive and fun people.
You seem pretty angry about someone that revolutionized the industry and sparked competition in a stagnant market. Every company that has contracts to launch payloads into space is relatively subsidized because the US government recognizes the exorbitant costs associated with R&D needed for space-related technology. This is a cost we accept as a society that plans to stay ahead of all others. Technology advancements in aerospace trickle down into everyday usages and the cost of launch payloads has become cheaper as well.
It's wild to me how much you all hate someone just because politically he doesn't align with your own world views.
Yeah, I consider myself a SpaceX fan and an Elon hater, especially since Elon is really accurate in his time estimates.
But it’s impossible for anybody to point at falcon and say it’s anything other than a massive success. They are able to not count the cost of the vehicle because the vehicle is reusable.
Now that IFT4 is in the books, even if HLS isn’t on time, spacex still has a vehicle that brings 100% of hardware back to earth. Even if they put legs in it instead of catching, even if they don’t solve 2hr turnaround, starship is now a 100% re-usable craft
Yes but most places arent having their infrastructure destroyed by missiles bombs and drones. Starlink has its uses the question is will that ever turn a profit. I hope this time they put measures in place this time to prevent Elon from deciding to sabotage Ukraine to benefit Putin.
> reusable rockets were around prior
oh I must have missed all the other rockets landing autonomously on barges in the ocean on a weekly basis…like what??? Having some design on paper isn’t anything remotely close to regularly launching and landing orbital class boosters, and reusing them.
At this point your argument is objectively fucking retarded dude. But fuck it lets just never build anything or innovate because it’s not magically profitable automatically.
Their launch costs are an order of magnitude less expensive than anything else. but sure just go ahead and flat out deny facts, and all of their cost reductions and legitimately incredible innovations. because they can’t manifest money out of thin fucking air lol.
a) I shouldn't even bother replying to you with the empty character attack.
b) NASA did it in 1987. So much for "on paper."
They concluded it wasn't cost-effective enough to continue with.
SpaceX, pre reusability was already cheaper than Russian launches.
i.e before reusability, before anyone had bailed out of Russia because of Ukraine they already had the price advantage.
We've come a long way from 1987..and you can't be telling me what I'm seeing today happened then. I have eyes
I'd really like to know too. He'll mention Shuttle. The program manager of shuttle works at SpaceX and explained why it's different https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=56527.0 (full text available on Reddit)
They might mention DCX or Masten, you can ask them if any part of those went to space
I can guarantee the mathematics to do that (MIMO control using liner algebra) has been around for quite sometime (like 50 years) as have the controllers to acquire data and crunch numbers for outputs with negligible stack execution times. Its about as impressive as implementing ray tracing in video games. Totally doable, just have to pay to implement it.
If a rocket company that has reusable boosters can't be profitable, then how are we looking at other rocket companies that don't have reusable boosters? To my knowledge SpaceX is the only one with such capability currently
Your question doesn't seem logical. What are you asking specifically? Correlating two different things.
The profitability of reuse doesn't alter the profitability of non-reuse. Or vice-versa.
Yes, there are non-reusable rocket companies. They seem to be profitable, but not very highly.
Reusable rockets, in theory, can be profitable in a long enough timeline. But it's yet to be seen. Musk himself says they're not there yet. Still burning through others' money.
Starlink seems to have some potential military applications but they are completely undermined by allowing a putin suck up like Musk to control what they can be used for. I could see that being taken over by the government during bankruptcy proceedings since the exhorbitant cost would be less important in that capacity than the strategic applications.
All of his enterprises are! He keep stealing our tax money to fund and promote a nazi cause, pollute, do idiotic projects like Starlik and immoral ones like Neuralink. He's an idiot supervillain.
I am saying he got financial incentives from the US government, he also can charge a inflated price for services and hardware. Who's to offer competition? It also applies to most defense companies.
Well yeah, the launches are a write off if the SpaceX is footing the bill, so they make money on paper. Most of his money is in credit on the companies he owns, so If the companies tank so does every dollar he has.
You’re right, in the long run starlink is not gonna make any money, but in the mean time, the taxpayer foots the bill since he’s getting insane tax reimbursements. Probably 60-100million per launch, that the banks pay for upfront, and they collect after taxes are filed. Probably one of the biggest cons of our time
> no one has landed rockets before them
I introduce to you to[the DCX - Delta Clipper 1/3 scale prototype](https://youtu.be/ZL9cLvYIDPE?si=a08e_SH23SPxKZY1) it flew 12 times with 2 vehicles and only failed when a landing leg didn’t deploy. They cut funding to focus on shuttle. Elon has publicly stated that falcon 9 was “ continuing the great work of the DCX project”
But yeah, nobody has made it commercially viable but SpaceX
None, it was a 1/3 scale model of what the program would have produced if nasa didn’t pivot more resources into ISS.
Landing propulsively is very difficult. Just like spacex they thought it would be easier to test in real life than to simulate, because free-falling cryogenic fluids aren’t always the cheapest to compute. Just like spacex they built the dcx to learn how to build a better system next time. It’s tragic they couldn’t continue.
When investors hold a vote and explicitly vote to give a less-than-one-day-a-week CEO an amount of stock greater than the lifetime profits of the company, you're looking at very "dumb investor money" indeed.
Let us not forget that Space X has pollution issues that will probably become financial issues. And Starlink is polluting our outer atmosphere with thousands of satellites.
Musk is probably already working on his new company that will clean everything up, and charge us to do it.
The biggest market for starlink, is 3rd world counties that can’t afford the subscription.
This whole product would have been rejected at idea stage if Elon didn’t immediately fire any employee that isn’t a yes man.
I wouldn't be so sure. Space Shuttle was America's first real foray into reusable spacecraft with the idea of driving down cost. That didn't work by virtue of Shuttle being massively, MASSIVELY complex (read, heavy with shitloads of failure points and an incredibly long turnaround time). By comparison Falcon 9 is stupid easy, and it builds on a lot of things learned from Shuttle, just like every space program before it.
I won't deny that space exploration is an enormous money sink though and that is the single thing I'll credit Musk for as the piggybank. He doesn't design them, build them, launch them or repair them.
With China staring down the US as a sort of ersatz new space race and with the new military branch that is the space force, I do not doubt that there's plenty of room in the spaceflight game right now.
I'm not saying this as a Musk stand; I'm saying it as a space exploration stand.
Elon HAS revolutionized my understanding of how easy it is for very wealthy people to get laid. A flight attendant rejected a 250k horse because he's so repellent, for example. Good on her bc I would've accepted the horse
They're doing a lot of what NASA used to do, and getting paid to do that. Aerospace contracting has brought down costs in the industry, even if it is mostly government funded. If you're going to argue that "government welfare" shouldn't exist for spaceX, you should by extension argue for NASA to be shut down, because SpaceX has survived off of NASA contracts since its inception.
Starlink is a departure from this history, but the cool thing about networking technology is it gets exponentially faster / cheaper over time. In the early 2000s I was able to get 56kbps. A little over 20 years later I'm getting 1gbps in both directions. And my area will prob be getting 2.5 gig and 10 gig in the coming years, just like some of the neighboring towns. So any limitations starlink has now on bandwidth or number of customers served will probably be solved in the coming years due to the exponential nature of networking tech.
I also do want to point out that although some of SpaceX's technology isn't revolutionary, a lot of it is because the launch cost is so much cheaper. Our university was able to send a small satellite to space for $50,000 a few years back. Some of the old commercially viable satellites cost several hundred million dollars in launch costs adjusted for inflation. OP either doesn't know what they're talking about or is making disingenuous arguments. Launching satellites has never been faster, cheaper, or easier, and it is in large part (but not entirely) to SpaceX and companies like SpaceX. Government and universities can do more long-term research projects then the private sector likes to focus on, but in terms of making things cheap, decent, and convenient, governments have always been terrible at that.
Bs on the starlink rant. I live a mile from comcast and they want a million to run comcast to my neighborhood so that ain't happening. Starlink is the only option! Have you ever had hughes or viasat? They suck ballz. You can litterly assume all those geo stationary customers are moving to starlink. And starlink has reduced the cost of equipment massively and last I checked they are now profitable. Im sure someone else called out your space x bs. I hate elon as well but as far as these 2 companies go they are doing just fine and musk doesn't really have that much control of either of them.
Guess I need to post to everyone commenting that starlink sucks and is basically viasat, it's not. Starlink is leo and it's speeds destroy viasat which is geo synchronous and like 22,000 miles from earth. They aren't comparable at all and starlink is stealing all of viasats and hughes customers. Im only a few miles from a big town and I cannot get fiber or even cable and I'm not alone. There are plenty of customers for starlink and it's finally just turned a profit so if you don't know anything about starlink just don't comment. Elmo is a massive dipshit but that doesn't mean starlink and space x aren't good companies. I'm pretty sure those companies are distancing them selves from elmo.
You have any sources to back this up or are you just talking out of your ass? Musk is douche which is why i follow this thread, but I also follow SpaceX very very closely and this just simply doesn’t line up. It’s painful when people cannot accept someone they hate can do something good. SpaceX is absolutely crushing their competition, flew humans 4 years before Boeing (both being awarded the contract at the same time with Boeing having the obvious advantage of being an established aerospace company and getting more federal money for their capsule), and has something like 300 successful Falcon 9 launches in a row. Don’t let hate blind you
Yes, my title and description were inaccurate. I should have amended that. Really, the problem is in Starlink, which is the backbone of SpaceX for funding. (NASA isn't going to keep pumping more money forever. Especially not the trillion + for Musk's Mars fantasy. They'll be lucky if their awards can get Starship finished at around 1 billion per test launch).
There's still plenty of reason to think Starlink won't make it. It's hard to know the true math right now. But many analysts don't see it adding up.
Maybe they'll scratch by with enough demand from their military contracts. That'll still be a far cry from the lofty goals Musk promises.
It seems obvious that building an orbital rocket from the ground up and launching thousands of disposable satellites into space just to sell mobile data plans would not be a profitable venture.
But think of the underserved rural African and Asian populations subsisting on $2/day. These people constitute a huge potential user base. They are just itching to spend $120/month on internet access.
Don’t forget the $500 equipment cost.
Yep, I am in rural area and can't get shit - I was a fan and still am of the technology but no way, living out in bum fuck nowhere, scraping to keep my homestead, am I gonna tie up 500 bucks to BE PUT ON A WAIT LIST.... For a Musk company lol No, luckily an older millennial like myself who was a native farm boy around here built a company doing line of sight access on cell towers that dot the fields in my area. They just upgraded to 5g wide band as well, so... I'd give starlink a shot still but with what I got I get decent speeds and the hardware was free. I just pay monthly and they upped our capabilities for free when they went to wideband. I've had 2 outages in 5 years. Both were from upgrades or maintenance and only lasted an hour or less.
Currently $200 off
Well, especially when most of the world that has money already has cell towers and landline based Internet that are both better than satellite Internet or satellite phone for like 99% of consumers. So yeah or you could just look at subscribers. Musk claim that he'd have over 20 million subscribers years ago and he's got like 2-3 million. So from my perspective, starship is completely reliant on big government contracts for science and space more or less. Personally, I am fairly confident that the moon and Mars base ideas are not going to work and governments will not be putting enormous amounts of money into either idea. Humans will value their lives more and more as time passes and technology gets better and there's no solution to the low gravity of the moon and earth, even if you saw all the other problems. Was gravity being such a core property of the universe it's not particularly easy to change And I don't believe humans can live long-term in .3 7G like on Mars and certainly not in like .1 G on the moon. So basically you're torturing all those poor people just to pretend like we need a base on the moon or Mars. Do you want to send them there to do a little bit of science OK, but that's not gonna be a long-term reoccurring contract that keeps starship in business and if anything we're going to win to shrink the rockets so they're more cost-effective for launching probes, rovers and satellites, but not usually massive bundles of satellites since that's not really that useful.
Hasn’t starlink price been jacked up like 3 times?
Once. From 99 to $120
Why are you trying to prevent humans from becoming Belters?
I cant wait to be speaking that space creole
The gravity aspect of living outside of earth is a huge aspect but space as a whole is completely inhospitable. The radiation emitted from the sun alone would give any would-be-Martians super cancer on their 2 month journey, and we have absolutely no way of blocking that without taking literal tons of water with us to use as “shielding” (which will never outcompete the magnetosphere) And that’s just the trip there! Mars itself is covered in poison. It’s covered in microscopic, impossible to remove in an airlock, perchlorates which are toxic to humans, most plants, and as an added bonus; UV radiation breaks down perchlorates into even more toxic materials that evens BACTERIA are having trouble surviving & coping with. Red rock is not made for man.
Floating balloon colonies on Venus would be safer than anything on Mars. At least above the clouds, it is 1 atmosphere of pressure and 25'C.
I’m a huge Venus proponent. People look at me like I have 2 heads until I explain that mars is a red herring (haha, get it?)
Right? Space is for probes, earth is for humans. By all means, lets learn all we can but the idea of colonizing that nightmare hellscape of a planet makes zero sense to me.
I strongly disagree. Space is our destiny. We must eventually reach out to space or we will die a type 1 civilization...at best. Also, O'Neil cylinders are our best best.
If we can subvert Kessler syndrome, humanity is poised to control and extract all recourses from our solar system in the next thousand years. I have a lot of hope for our species. It’s however an inescapable truth that we evolved for life on earth, and not for the exotic life of space. We’ll have to make a lot of technological advances if we ever want to live comfortably in the void. Even then it’ll be most likely that we stay planetside and have drones do our dirty works Even if faster than light travel turns out to be impossible, I feel the human urge to conquer will drive us to send genesis ships to identified habitable exoplanets.
oh no, some arbitrary sci-fi number won't be achieved.
"Space is our destiny" is a slogan. What on Mars makes it worth the giant cost of getting there let alone trying to colonize it. Doesnt it make infinitely more sense to try an clean up this planet than create a new earth in a place that at its warmest is like 10 degrees and lacks a magnetic shield suitable gravity ect. Beyond that getting to other solar systems is probably beyond the resources we have on this planet to accomplish. With current tech it's a 150000 year trip.
There is nothing worth traveling to and colonizing anywhere near our planet. Going to mars is the single stupidest waste of resources our species has ever come up with. So of course Elon is obsessed with it.
I felt like I was on crazy pills hearing people get excited about Mars colonization.
Ikr, I think people tend to forget how much on Earth we take for granted. From birds to the goddamn wind. Maybe you don't appreciate now - but you will sure as hell wonder why you left it when it's gone
Especially when number one, we are nowhere near overpopulation of Earth and indeed, modern trends indicate that population growth contains itself with social pressures, no starvation or war even needed. People just stop breeding. All that money is MUCH better spent fixing and protecting Earth. 100 years from now, we'll be colonizing Mars, but not 10 years and not 20 years and anyone with even an ounce of sense knows that.
Call me crazy, and you will: I honestly think that the reason money flows so effortlessly to space-buses like Starship and the like is that the think tanks have finally convinced the uberwealthy that it's time to get a ticket off, anywhere. If the climate can be dealt with, there will be a lot of reckoning coming the way of the forces responsible, for generations. If the climate cannot then the anger and panic will only be able to be controlled for so long before anyone seen as rich or responsible will be hanging from streetlights and power poles. Musk is their escape plan.
We have almost no data about human physiology in partial gravity. There is plenty of data now on microgravity from the ISS and other extended orbital missions. And, of course, the baseline data at 1G from all of us on earth. The ONLY data points that are between those are exactly 12 men spending an average of 2 days at lunar gravity, and that after being in microgravity and high G environments shortly before. We have essentially NO idea what the shape of the curve between 0 G and 1 G is. It may be that Mars gravity is perfectly healthy. Or not. We don't know.
When was that projection made? What year did they say they'd have their first customers? If you adjust it to the first year they had customers does it line up?
I think what we always underestimate is just how much more preferable it is make life better for everyone here and that drive will continue into the future. Living on the moon, mars etc is cool until you get the reality check that NOTHING is there, no birds, not even a breeze. I think humanity will still push to build these kind of things as they will be important hypothetically in a few million years, but also due to that fact such ventures will always be relogated to being side projects that are always secondary, (as they should be).
great response
Um there are still dead zones in the us for cell service and starlink is better then alot of land based providers and is def better than any other sat internet provider
Look how well satellite consumer services have worked in the past, bankruptcies and heavy losses for years and years.
Compared to what is being done now it is better
The orbital rocket surprised me somewhat. Seems like a good idea to reuse as much of the rocket as possible, even the Shuttle worked that way. Starlink was always gonna be a flop. Viasat has been trying to get it to work but hasn’t succeeded, and there have been many billionaires that went bankrupt trying to achieve it.
What? Viasat is geo orbital and sucks ass. They are losing all their customers to starlink
The idea has been around since at least when I was a kid in 1995 and read a news article claiming Bill Gates was putting money in the research. At the time his goal was providing 56k everywhere around the globe but the idea never justified the costs. The Russians were already launching the Soyuz (which still launch for the same cost SpaceX charges).. Musk basically stole the idea from his customer OneWeb as he was desperate to find a use for his Starship promise (remember the "earth-to-earth transportation" original idea he presented?)
All that soon to be space junk moving extremely fast in low orbit can't be good.
https://stansberryresearch.com/articles/the-three-flaws-in-elon-musks-house-of-cards-2 Long but a very informative read
Thanks!
The analysis is obviously bunk. Let's see if you can find it's issues
If you know them, how about you actually point them out instead of playing this game?
SpaceX profitability is less of a concern than the launch capacity it gives the US and others. If they failed they'd get nationalized, or some similar scheme.
No, SpaceX is doing OK with their smaller rockets, it's a starship that probably doesn't have a lot of good uses even though it costs max amount of money. I doubt they'd get nationalized, I don't think NASA wants to own a rocket company that's why they've always outsourced the rocket building part even if they were to design the initial thing themselves. They're not going to build a factory and supply chain and all that bullshit. Instead of the government would just put out contracts for companies to replace the SpaceX rockets more or less just like they have with the space shuttle being replaced, which of course you know like that it actually make the space shuttle rather a whole bunch of private companies and the same goes with the Saturn V rockets, they always outsourced the work so that's what you should always expect.
The OP claims they aren't doing OK with Falcon in the first place
"claims" with no added information or links. That should tell you everything right there.
yeah but this is fact-free rant subreddit so it doesn't have to many any sense. "obviously" SpaceX is terrible
Satellite Internet isn't commercially viable over direct fiber. Unless maybe you live in Antarctica. Even for rural areas, it's mostly the initial investment of the fiber that is the challenge, which is still cheaper than launching thousands of satellites into space. SpaceX, I don't know anything about rockets so I'll stay in my lane.
Yea um Comcast is 1 mile away from my neighborhood and wants a million to connect us. Starlink is fine aside from latency for fps games which you can still play. Try running fiber thru the Rockies and get back to me. You obviously know nothing about starlink either
For 99% of the population fiber is better. Launching thousands of satellites for the other 1% isn't commercially viable. It's the same conversation for power lines. For some customers it's actually cheaper to buy a generator and give them free fuel than it is to hook up and manage power lines. Yet everyone has power lines...
Look, I cannot stand Musk - he’s a piece of shit of the highest order - but SpaceX is important. Starlink, not so much, that’s nothing new or innovative but SpaceX has made launches routine and the norm. Thankfully Musk is mostly just the cheerleader for SpaceX and the smart people get to do their thing and they get shit done. SpaceX is MASSIVELY funded by government subsidies/projects and I’d never argue it was a good investment for investors. As a country though, it’s vitally important we have this easy access to space. Easy access to launch & lift tons and tons of whatever we need to get up.
>Starlink, not so much, that’s nothing new or innovative You don't live remote. I live on an Alaskan island. We don't have fiber, Hughes net is laughable trash, that costs double for less than 1/5th the speeds and like a 30gb month data cap, only cellphone provider is ATT and covers maybe 1/4 of our island(might be generous), starlink has been a huge success here, and other remote areas. You don't just run fiber hundreds of miles through the ocean and mountains to service 800 people. But launching satellites that can move and service different communities helps all our schools, health clinic, law enforcement response, small business, etc. I literally have starlink on my boat, I can drop anchor and watch a movie, or call for help. Without starlink, I'm hoping someone someone is on the radio, and can find me. Fiber/other satellite providers don't offer that.
Glad it works for you. Doesn’t change my opinion of it. It’s nothing hugely innovative, they’re just willing to throw A LOT of hardware up there. They can do that thanks to the part I said was vitally important, the launch capability. I’m not saying starlink is a bad thing or anything and I’m sure some people benefit from it. I’m just skeptical that they can just continuously toss millions of dollars in satellites up there nonstop and repeat that every few years unless they get a lot more subscribers and regardless, I see SpaceX as our way to space; not as an ISP.
They don't need a ton of subscribers if they offer something no one else can and is vitally important. Hence the reason they get a ton of money from the military, and not just the US military. If you want internet in a trench in Ukraine for instance, you don't have many options, starlink provides that, and governments will pay to keep an edge in warfare. No reason their needs a large swath of individuals as subscribers. Lockheed Martin is a huge company, it's not like they have a ton of different customers. Starlink being available to private citizens is simply a bonus alternative revenue stream. Innovative is new methods or ideas. I would argue they are Innovative as no other company has ever used the method of launching soo many satellites.
They can only launch soooo many satellites because of their launch business which is hugely subsidized by the US government. Other companies are working on getting satellites up as well and that will bring competition. That can go one of two ways. It can either offer the same service at the same/similar locations and cause the market to charge accordingly or it can go the way every other telco/ISP battle has gone and they artificially keep the prices high and they split the market up. Regardless, it’s still not the point of SpaceX and never will be. They’re not built to be an ISP, that’s a fun little side project for them. Having a communications network established in space is a good thing to have for a company that hopes to launch people into space beyond the ISS.
It actually isn't heavily subsidized at all. More Reddit bullshit.
>They can only launch soooo many satellites because of their launch business which is hugely subsidized by the US government They were subsidized because they were innovative and the first to start mass launching. >Other companies are working on getting satellites up as well and that will bring competition If they get them up, they were not first and won't be getting the same govt funding. >They’re not built to be an ISP, that’s a fun little side project for them. I literally said that, it's alternative revenue for them, but they are still being innovative in doing something with a method no other company ever has. >Having a communications network established in space is a good thing to have for a company that hopes to launch people into space beyond the ISS. That sounds super innovative unless you know other companies close to sending people into space beyond the ISS? I am not sure what you are arguing about, you said they were not innovative, but your points say otherwise. They are ahead massively of any competition, and the govt paid for most of it, so has no need to pay other companies to do the same thing.
He hates Musk so is trying to find ways to belittle what he's done. Usual for this sub.
Your opinion isn't worth anything, that's my opinion 😂😂
I agree here, you can say SpaceX is doing nothing new, which is a half truth. What they've done is streamlined the process of launching rockets and has definitely made the industry more competitive. Look at fucking Boeing right now, they have completely fucked up their platform to carry astronauts. SpaceX did it flawlessly, no one has landed rockets before them, no one has reused rockets like them, no one modernized and simplified vehicle controls like them. The Starship is yet to be seen as a success, but with the latest test it looks to be actually usable. The Falcon 9 platform is becoming really mature. Hell they reflew one booster 21 times, if you know anything about rockets you'd know that's insane for a booster. This is all assuming Elon the mega dumbass doesn't run this company into the ground. Additionally I think anyone speculating the financials of a private company is an absolute fraud and disingenuous. You just literally don't know.
Leo sats that beam internet to each other thru lasers is nothing new? Wtf are you talking about?
Yeah, that’s not happening. The fuel needed to keep those lasers and the receivers aligned for every last bit and byte will be enormous over time. But, if, IF, this does happen, I’ll be right back here to take it back
So I work for an MSP and we offer Starlink to some folks where it makes sense. It's funny to see how fast they've raised their prices and how quickly their speeds have dwindled once people actually start using it.
It went up $10 and my speeds are still the same
My dad is deeply convinced that Starlink is the future of telecoms, and I've tried to convince him otherwise, like by pointing out that the rural market or whoever currently isn't being served by telecoms are niche target demos. The problem is I'm basically only guessing about the numbers, and my guesses aren't any more convincing to my dad than his guesses are. If you have actual numbers I could point to, I would greatly appreciate it. I wanna bring receipts next time I talk to my dad.
Only my personal experience but I am in a rural mountainous area. I have some small name 5g service for home Internet. Not even sure which network it runs on. It's gone down once in the past year. At least that I've noticed, but with kids and working from home, I would notice most day time outages. A friend has Starlink. I wouldn't say it's bad by any means but it seems every other month there is some issue. I'm not switching.
We've had Starlink in rural Montana now for almost 3 years, it's been more reliable than the DSL we had before.
Absolutely for some markets it makes a ton of sense. The problem is the vast majority of the world that can afford starlink lives in urban areas with fiber internet access already.
All these idiots in here talking shit have never used starlink and are clueless. Rual areas have fiber, yea ok. You ever run fiber in the Rockies dipshits? Comcast wants 1 million to run it 1 mile to my neighborhood and im in the freaking mtns. Starlink is the only other option and is outperforms dsl and cable is a ton of markets. I have had mine for 4 years with zero issues.
Yea so your 5g that will get throttled is nowher as good as starlink. Im in the mtns as well and starlink destroys my 5g. Unless you are next to a 5g tower there is no comparison. I would look at starlink again, I stream in 4k, try that on your 5g cell service
Satellite comms are actually a very untapped market with a lot of room for potential profit. I was on Amazons Kuiper project until recently and the numbers they spout are pretty promising….. but I’m also a tech guy and not a finance guy so what do I know
Ships, planes, semis, people living in vehicles, rual areas. It's not bs. If it wasn't profitable hughes and viasat wouldn't exist
This is obviously an anecdote, but I have a ranch and need to have backup internet when I am working there. So, I have T-mobile wireless and Starlink. I exclusively use T-mobile unless they have an outage. The data rate is a bit slower, but it feels much faster and is more stable.
It may not be such an amazing thing for civilian comms, but I'm pretty sure the military will pay a bunch of money for it. I had to deal with a lot of military communications in the early 2000's. I don't think most people realize just how much a geostationary sat link sucks. Sending data is like working with early 56K dial-up modems but with far more dropped packets. If the US government needs high bandwidth, low latency connections to power things like "network warfare," remote control of platforms like B21 (flying without humans), NGAD, and small drones, Starlink is an amazing system.
Geostationary sucks ass!! I had some idiot on here tell me viasat was the same as starlink, um no it's not. One is 22,000 miles from earth while the other is 800 miles. Half the people commenting just hate musk as I do as well, I'm just not an idiot like them
Somebody did a breakdown of it o. YouTube. I think it might have been Adam Something or Thunderbolt. There’s one other super detailed guy out there calling Musk out. He sometimes overstates his argument but I’ve seen worse. Common Sense Skeptic. That was it. I’m on my phone and it’s late now. But he’s probably got the numbers from a year or two ago broken down. Might be pre-Ukraine though.
Beware of common sense skeptic. The Wall Street part of TSLAQ doesn't like him because he's like Musk - he sounds like he knows what he's talking about but is confidently getting stuff wrong. He's also a massive Qanon conspiracy theorist.
Yeah. I think I mentioned he over states his argument.
His numbers are wrong. He thinks AWS egress prices are what SpaceX pays for transit (you can get 100Gbps for under $100k per year if you shop around) and that SpaceX is paying retail launch prices for starlink. Once you put reasonable numbers in his model you'll know it's wrong because starlink isn't profitable yet
Yeah. Those YouTubers break down all the nonsense musk spouts. I’m pretty sure the common sense skeptic has the numbers in starlink.
Starlink offers me 30 down and 10 up minimum for 90$ a month. In low traffic times I see up to 180 down and 20 up. Nobody in my area gets anywhere close to those speeds, and it's cheaper.
So viasat and hughes who have been around forever and were profitable are not viable? Because that's who starlink is stealing customers from. Starlink was just profitable by the way
This isn’t the correct take. He didn’t start those businesses. And the reason they’re still running is because the government told him to get fucked. Now, we have future problems of billionaires like Musk using Starlink to help enemy states…….
He literally founded SpaceX.
Yeah got me. He actually did start 1 company. Rest of point stands.
I was at a gathering with the president of Port Canaveral, who used to carry the nuclear football for daddy bush. He was a real musk fluffer. He was telling me how great it was that starlink was going to provide internet service to remote areas that never had service before. He stopped talking to me when I asked him how a filly in the Philippines living on $50 a month would be able to afford the $500 dish and $100/mo subscription?
There's several orgs paying for GEO internet today to reach the unreached and mobile tower providers that provide sat service to Telcos and 4G to users. https://old.reddit.com/r/musked/comments/1dfgx4e/spacex_starlink_is_a_big_money_loser/l8kivrg/ Africa Mobile Networks for example. And KDDI in Japan
Really? And yet nothing in the Philippines except cellular. Please name the orgs who are providing free equipment and service. I’m know it ain’t Elon.
well I for one hope starlink doesn’t fold. We just installed one in a school in the middle of Philippine nowhere and they’re happy to finally have internet in their IT room.
Lmao it’s amazing how few of you have any concept of the world outside your own county 😂. Starlink has completely demolished the entire vsat industry. It is absolutely not a product to displace your Comcast cable modem. Just hilarious.
Y’all would hate on the Baby Saver 9000 if you thought Elon was involved in making it.
Starlink is a game changer for us. $175 a month, near flawless service. I hope it servives.
Actually falcon 9 is EXTREMELY cost effective to launch. The cheapest launch vehicle overall in human history. We have single boosters doing 100+ launches. I'm far from an Elon simp, in fact I won't lie, I fucking hate that guy. But the only good work he's done is his work at SpaceX. We'll see what happens with starship but if it works out that company will be profitable for eternity. It'll be the Amazon of space.
I for one respect SpaceX and its people. They've accomplished more, in less time and for less money than any nation on earth has. All of this in spite of having Elon's borderline personality, petulance, and perversion soaking up all the credit and generally causing chaos. It's like running a marathon in wooden clogs and winning.
As long as they keep it up for now as I live in the sticks and need my star link until there's a viable alternative.
Any sources to support you?
re: Starlink, I work on ships and I can tell you as far as ships around the world there is massive demand for Starlink. It's quickly replacing the entire older system that was mostly in place: INMARSAT to provide high speed data to ships in the middle of the ocean. And it works AMAZING. Can't comment on whether it's profitable or not, but if Starlink went under someone else would take up the slack I'm sure.
SpaceX is profitable for every falcon launch. What isn't profitable is Boeing's Starliner. You're pulling facts from nowhere when launch costs are lower than they have ever been for reusable rockets. A launch cost for any other company is an entire rocket. NASA eats it's own costs when it was dealing with a space shuttle to refurb and the boosters. The shuttle eating most of it due to it being habitable space.
Starlink is just space routers.
The money maker behind Starlink isn't basic internet services. Its about 30% faster for international communication compared to cable and fiber. That speed is critical for international financial transactions like buying and selling stocks. That's the big money customer.
Launch price ≠ Launch costs. Musk does a lot of very stupid shit, but lumping Spacex in as a failure with nothing but conjecture isn’t a winning argument.
Musk’s sycophant dicksucker crowd are mostly shareholders. They want him to win because stonks go up, and if they have more money in their wallet they feel justified calling anyone without it a loser. The polar opposite of an unbiased party, and anything they say can and should be dismissed as motivated purely by greed.
But SpaceX is a private company. How can SpaceX fans have a financial interest in it?
It’s still cool that they come back down and land like that. I dislike Musk as much as the next person, but it feels like we can’t appreciate anything these days once it’s politicized. Enjoy the art not the artist kinda thing, I think what Elon’s company, what his engineers did is neat. This is saying nothing about the profitability, ethics, or anything else about space x.
I agree. Too many people here are completely black pill doomers. Landing a 40 story building is incredible from a technical perspective and all of humanity should be celebrating like we did when airplanes were invented. But noooo. Better think of a reason why this is actually a bad thing!
Who had reusable rockets before SpaceX?
NASA orbiter
lol. GTFOH with that. The orbiter wasn’t a rocket - it was a fat plane and needed boosters to get into space. Those boosters were not reusable.
just seems to me, it is much preferable that an American company takes American to the ISS rather than relying on the Russians. but then again, I guess Musk did take away the Left's favorite toy - Twitter - so they gonna hate even if he comes up with a cure for cancer
I am not a fan of musk but starlink is the real deal, it works well at high speeds, also I know tons overlanders, Truckers, and small towns sign up like crazy for star link not excluding all the countries around the world that don’t have speeds like 1st world countries. It will bring down the cost of internet on a mobile platform. I use it every time I am going camping where I have zero cell reception. Remote work has never become so easy
Everyone I know loves their Starlink. Why is that a bad thing here?
It’s not a bad thing but it’s important to point out it’s unsustainable. Just like everyone enjoys a 1st world lifestyle but there’s not enough resources to provide that to 8 billion people
It’s not perfect and Elon is a tool but his starlink unfortunately will be successful To give internet to people/places instead of running wires underground or through mountains I think Elon should go to jail for insider trading and some of his other companies are crap But starlink isn’t a bad idea He should just have someone smart running it not Elon insider trading musky pits He should be getting investigated for the insider trading then investors would be better informed
"Musk's aerospace company SpaceX grew from operating with a net loss on revenue of $1.45 billion in 2019 to [an operating profit of about $3 billion](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/spacex-forecasts-doubling-of-revenue-to-8-billion?rc=k61ljn) on $9 billion in revenue in 2023, according to the Information and [documents viewed by *TechCrunch*](https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/11/internal-pre-starlink-spacex-financials-show-big-spending-on-moonshot-bets/)." Do people in this sub just blindly believe any bullshit people post.........
I believe his core argument is that if you price starlink launches at public pricing rather than internal costs it won't be profitable in its 5 year cycle
Eh his post says otherwise. As usual a Redditor makes up shit and pretends it's fact.
There is a reason why Elon wont take the whole thing public. It's also suspect as hell that he claims to have reduced the cost of getting shit into space by like over 90 percent. It would be like a airline claiming they can get you from NY to Hong Kong for 100 bucks and make money. You can reduce costs in a given field by margins by a 10 fold decrease without some sort of ground breaking new tech is absurd.
A screw sold to the government cost 100× More than it should. And that's not an exaggeration. It wouldn't suprise me if he was comparing 'screw from Home Depot' to 'government screw'. Which would explain the 90% reduction. So no. A better analogy would be it would be like comparing going from NY to HK in a F16 vs a commercial Boeing. That would be where the 90% cost reduction comes from. This would also not require new tech. It's simply pointing out how bloated government spending is. We should hold our politicians more acocutnbale for their spending considering just this year alone, they're adding 6k in dept PER PERSON (man, woman, and child) to our deficit just this year alone. https://www.usdebtclock.org/
You don’t go public unless you have to do so to raise a bunch of money. Going public has terrible consequences for a business like SpaceX that is pushing the limits.
Terrible consequences like no longer being able to effortlessly lie about its financials. If going public so terrible why are almost all the world's largest companies public? Space X is pushing the limits aka putting satellites into orbit like has been done for 60 years albeit at a reduced cost.
It's not hard when you're competing with old ULA prices
> You can reduce costs in a given field by margins by a 10 fold decrease without some sort of ground breaking new tech is absurd. What do you think rocket reusability is? In your analogy the existing airlines are throwing away every plane after flying it once, while SpaceX is re-using most if the plane and working on re-using 100%. Also, even without reusability they were already more efficient because of the management style and work culture being totally different to the established companies caught in a cycle of lobbying and cost-plus contracts that incentive inefficiency.
What reusable rockets were around prior?
Idk as someone who lives in a rural area, me and all of my neighbors use starlink. It's definitely changed internetvin the boonies for a lot of families. Before starlink, all we had was HughesNet, and that service sucked.
It’s hard to imagine why indigenous peoples throughout the world, few of whom have electricity, aren’t clamoring to sign up for StarLink. Boggles the mind it does.
You would be correct (also, I really dislike Musk), but you are forgetting about the Billions they received from the fed to do all manner of launches. Many we don’t even know the contents of.
For a very different take on the long-term term viability, profitability, and future prospects of SpaceX, here's a video from an Australian military economist. https://youtu.be/effFp6AnCWo?si=TZeJgp40z2BUCBRG
What are you even talking about? Spacex has dramatically lower the cost of launching rockets. And while spacex wasn't profitable in the past due to research and development cost, it is now profitable in the billions. And if it wasn't for spacex we would still be dependent on Russia for space flights. For people that say starlink is not needed, I'm glad you have access to cheap fast internet, but for many including my self I would not have access to high speed Internet if it wasn't for starlink.
"SpaceX hasn't really revolutionized anything." This and the whole post are by FAR the worst takes I've ever seen on reddit.
Look at how starlink was used in Ukraine. Like it or hate it, Starlink is going to be heavily invested in by defense contractors. You can bet your ass on it. You can also bet other nations like Russia and China will launch their own proliferated low earth orbit networks.
If only someone had invented a phone which can work via satellite.
The US has had for years a large network of satellites it utilizes for national defenese. Even if it contracts with starlink does that make up for the civilian internet being a total flop? Probably not. There is a reason spaceX hasn't gone public.
Musk is just a grifter of taxpayer subsidies. No other human has received more direct or indirect subsidies and govt money than musk. His only business that doesn’t steal from the taxpayer is Twitter. That one is down 70%. Coincidence?
SpaceX provides the most cost effective launch service to the US government. How is that stealing taxpayer money?
Don't bother, they won't get it. Every single aerospace company in the US receives government money. It would be impossible to get into space without our tax funding which would set us back to a point where we would be wondering if getting to the moon is possible. These are the same types of people that want free everything but complain when we invest in companies that advance our civilization and have some of the highest return on investment technology wise than any other sector. Don't believe me? Check out how much of your everyday items and materials used today are the result of the aerospace industry.
It’s not a loser It is a funnel for musk to accept government handouts and welfare by a different name so that rightwingers can support it
A: all rocket companies receive subsidies and will continue to do so B: the right wing it hates subsidies C: the United States government extracts from SpaceX a service. A service that no other company in America is able to provide as demonstrated by Boeing this last week.
You’re not wrong. But it’s elmo. So the grift and self righteousness are at positively trumpian levels
Space is right wing now? That's news to me. I'll make sure not to support space. Thanks.
Wow talk about failing to read
None of your assertions are backed by any evidence I can find anywhere.
Do you have numbers to back up what you’re claiming?
Does Elon have numbers to back up what HE's claiming?
Starlink launches at-cost pricing. No profit made. -- Launch costs not included in the profitability calculations, by their own conditions.
Any data to back up your claims?
Why is this such a mystery to people. The company hasn't made it a secret (well, the exact numbers they have ... which isn't a promising sign).... they're operating "at cost". Every launch is a loss. Of course, they aim to generate profit. But it's yet to be seen. And those who've calculated ranges don't come out with favorable numbers. They'll be lucky to break even.
Plenty of things to be critical of Enron about.... This post is just bs though, Starlink is set to make a profit this year. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/just-5-years-after-its-first-launch-the-starlink-constellation-is-profitable/
There are many other sources that are very doubtful of this, with their own researchers, such as Bloomberg. To be fair, there's no true way to know without transparency. But if they were truly at the door to profit, they'd be open with the numbers. (Musk always brags)
It's not a publicly traded company, most of musk's bragging involves pump and dump scamming of retail investors.
He still relies on private investors. That's exactly why these launches are made into a spectacle to generatethe next round of funds. Blue Origin and other rocket companies don't need to worry about image or numbers the way SpaceX does.
Blue Origin has yet to have a single successful orbital launch, no one in history has put more tons in space than space x has, that's why you don't hear any hype around Blue Origin. You are barking up the wrong tree here, falcon 9 is not only the most reliable rocket in history, it also is the cheapest in history.
> reusable rockets were around prior Okay, name one. Did they also land themselves? Could they be turned around for another flight within a week?
>SpaceX hasn't really revolutionized anything. Reusable rockets were around prior, and they've always been nearly unprofitable. Haha dude WTF are you talking about? WHAT reusable rockets? The shuttle? That thing required MONTHS of refurbishment between launches, the oxygen tank is completely expendable, and the solid boosters also required major work between flights. NASA openly admitted that the reusability of the shuttle was not economical, and did not meet the original design promise. SpaceX is turning around Falcon 9's in DAYS. They have launched 430,000kg of payloads into orbit, the next-highest entity (govt or otherwise) is like 30,000kg. It's insane what they've done >I just wanted to point this out as fodder against the Musk simps who claim that "at least he made rocket launches far cheaper!".... No. He didn't. Yeah, he did. How do you not understand that building a brand-new rocket for every launch is way more expensive than re-using a F9 first stage 25 times with almost no refurbishment required? >Despite claims of positive cash flow, the only way they can be green on paper is by not taking into account launch cost. ... Yes, that's right. A rocket launch company that doesn't include the rocket launch costs. 😆 You are conflating starlink profitability with launch costs/profitability. Logical fallacy. Plus who gives a shit? Putting Starlink in space is a massive capital investment for long term gains. Amazon didn't make money for decades and nobody complains about that shit nowadays.
Is that you China?
Yikes. Musk may have lost his mind, overpromised, etc. Space X is the real deal. Tremendous achievement. The best of Boeing, Northrup Grumman and the rest can't touch Space X price and reliability. Great engineering. Tell me, who had reusable rockets before X? No. Everyone including the Chinese are playing catch up.
Those are also public companies that can't lie about massive losses.
Losses so great that Lockheed and Boeing had to stop pretending to collude and just made ULA instead
It’s fine to hate on Musk, but as someone from the aerospace industry and that happens a to be a SpaceX customer, what you wrote is not the reality. SpaceX revolutionised flights in terms of time to space, costs and ride-sharing options. I’ve worked with ex-SpaceX employees that dreaded Musk but loved the mission, and they’re all really nice, productive and fun people.
You seem pretty angry about someone that revolutionized the industry and sparked competition in a stagnant market. Every company that has contracts to launch payloads into space is relatively subsidized because the US government recognizes the exorbitant costs associated with R&D needed for space-related technology. This is a cost we accept as a society that plans to stay ahead of all others. Technology advancements in aerospace trickle down into everyday usages and the cost of launch payloads has become cheaper as well. It's wild to me how much you all hate someone just because politically he doesn't align with your own world views.
Man you Musk haters are something else..
Yeah, I consider myself a SpaceX fan and an Elon hater, especially since Elon is really accurate in his time estimates. But it’s impossible for anybody to point at falcon and say it’s anything other than a massive success. They are able to not count the cost of the vehicle because the vehicle is reusable. Now that IFT4 is in the books, even if HLS isn’t on time, spacex still has a vehicle that brings 100% of hardware back to earth. Even if they put legs in it instead of catching, even if they don’t solve 2hr turnaround, starship is now a 100% re-usable craft
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It's not a lot of money. Other (non Pentagon) agencies are paying more
Yes but most places arent having their infrastructure destroyed by missiles bombs and drones. Starlink has its uses the question is will that ever turn a profit. I hope this time they put measures in place this time to prevent Elon from deciding to sabotage Ukraine to benefit Putin.
They did put measures. The contract they refused to sign has been signed and now extended.
> reusable rockets were around prior oh I must have missed all the other rockets landing autonomously on barges in the ocean on a weekly basis…like what??? Having some design on paper isn’t anything remotely close to regularly launching and landing orbital class boosters, and reusing them. At this point your argument is objectively fucking retarded dude. But fuck it lets just never build anything or innovate because it’s not magically profitable automatically. Their launch costs are an order of magnitude less expensive than anything else. but sure just go ahead and flat out deny facts, and all of their cost reductions and legitimately incredible innovations. because they can’t manifest money out of thin fucking air lol.
a) I shouldn't even bother replying to you with the empty character attack. b) NASA did it in 1987. So much for "on paper." They concluded it wasn't cost-effective enough to continue with.
SpaceX, pre reusability was already cheaper than Russian launches. i.e before reusability, before anyone had bailed out of Russia because of Ukraine they already had the price advantage. We've come a long way from 1987..and you can't be telling me what I'm seeing today happened then. I have eyes
You should definitely name the launcher NASA used in 1987 that determined the cost inefficiency of reusability.
I'd really like to know too. He'll mention Shuttle. The program manager of shuttle works at SpaceX and explained why it's different https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=56527.0 (full text available on Reddit) They might mention DCX or Masten, you can ask them if any part of those went to space
I can guarantee the mathematics to do that (MIMO control using liner algebra) has been around for quite sometime (like 50 years) as have the controllers to acquire data and crunch numbers for outputs with negligible stack execution times. Its about as impressive as implementing ray tracing in video games. Totally doable, just have to pay to implement it.
If a rocket company that has reusable boosters can't be profitable, then how are we looking at other rocket companies that don't have reusable boosters? To my knowledge SpaceX is the only one with such capability currently
Your question doesn't seem logical. What are you asking specifically? Correlating two different things. The profitability of reuse doesn't alter the profitability of non-reuse. Or vice-versa. Yes, there are non-reusable rocket companies. They seem to be profitable, but not very highly. Reusable rockets, in theory, can be profitable in a long enough timeline. But it's yet to be seen. Musk himself says they're not there yet. Still burning through others' money.
He claims they aren't there yet for starlink, not launch
Yes, you're right. I definitely misspoke in my post. It's the Starlink side that's the issue.
Starlink is a weapon
Starlink seems to have some potential military applications but they are completely undermined by allowing a putin suck up like Musk to control what they can be used for. I could see that being taken over by the government during bankruptcy proceedings since the exhorbitant cost would be less important in that capacity than the strategic applications.
Is Biden a Putin suck up too? Because Ukraine has had similar limits on US weaponry
All of his enterprises are! He keep stealing our tax money to fund and promote a nazi cause, pollute, do idiotic projects like Starlik and immoral ones like Neuralink. He's an idiot supervillain.
He is making big bucks off The US taxpayer
Who is also the traditional biggest launch, satellite and satellite service buyer. It's like complaining about Lockheed doing that
I am saying he got financial incentives from the US government, he also can charge a inflated price for services and hardware. Who's to offer competition? It also applies to most defense companies.
“Fake it til you make it but you can faking it as long as you buy all the speech” -Musk probably
Well yeah, the launches are a write off if the SpaceX is footing the bill, so they make money on paper. Most of his money is in credit on the companies he owns, so If the companies tank so does every dollar he has. You’re right, in the long run starlink is not gonna make any money, but in the mean time, the taxpayer foots the bill since he’s getting insane tax reimbursements. Probably 60-100million per launch, that the banks pay for upfront, and they collect after taxes are filed. Probably one of the biggest cons of our time
> no one has landed rockets before them I introduce to you to[the DCX - Delta Clipper 1/3 scale prototype](https://youtu.be/ZL9cLvYIDPE?si=a08e_SH23SPxKZY1) it flew 12 times with 2 vehicles and only failed when a landing leg didn’t deploy. They cut funding to focus on shuttle. Elon has publicly stated that falcon 9 was “ continuing the great work of the DCX project” But yeah, nobody has made it commercially viable but SpaceX
Come on, how big was the orbital payload?!
None, it was a 1/3 scale model of what the program would have produced if nasa didn’t pivot more resources into ISS. Landing propulsively is very difficult. Just like spacex they thought it would be easier to test in real life than to simulate, because free-falling cryogenic fluids aren’t always the cheapest to compute. Just like spacex they built the dcx to learn how to build a better system next time. It’s tragic they couldn’t continue.
When investors hold a vote and explicitly vote to give a less-than-one-day-a-week CEO an amount of stock greater than the lifetime profits of the company, you're looking at very "dumb investor money" indeed.
Let us not forget that Space X has pollution issues that will probably become financial issues. And Starlink is polluting our outer atmosphere with thousands of satellites. Musk is probably already working on his new company that will clean everything up, and charge us to do it.
The biggest market for starlink, is 3rd world counties that can’t afford the subscription. This whole product would have been rejected at idea stage if Elon didn’t immediately fire any employee that isn’t a yes man.
I wouldn't be so sure. Space Shuttle was America's first real foray into reusable spacecraft with the idea of driving down cost. That didn't work by virtue of Shuttle being massively, MASSIVELY complex (read, heavy with shitloads of failure points and an incredibly long turnaround time). By comparison Falcon 9 is stupid easy, and it builds on a lot of things learned from Shuttle, just like every space program before it. I won't deny that space exploration is an enormous money sink though and that is the single thing I'll credit Musk for as the piggybank. He doesn't design them, build them, launch them or repair them. With China staring down the US as a sort of ersatz new space race and with the new military branch that is the space force, I do not doubt that there's plenty of room in the spaceflight game right now. I'm not saying this as a Musk stand; I'm saying it as a space exploration stand.
Elon HAS revolutionized my understanding of how easy it is for very wealthy people to get laid. A flight attendant rejected a 250k horse because he's so repellent, for example. Good on her bc I would've accepted the horse
Was it really worth 250k? That sounds like a remarkable horse.
That's what I read but honestly it could all be lies, I'd have no idea.
They're doing a lot of what NASA used to do, and getting paid to do that. Aerospace contracting has brought down costs in the industry, even if it is mostly government funded. If you're going to argue that "government welfare" shouldn't exist for spaceX, you should by extension argue for NASA to be shut down, because SpaceX has survived off of NASA contracts since its inception. Starlink is a departure from this history, but the cool thing about networking technology is it gets exponentially faster / cheaper over time. In the early 2000s I was able to get 56kbps. A little over 20 years later I'm getting 1gbps in both directions. And my area will prob be getting 2.5 gig and 10 gig in the coming years, just like some of the neighboring towns. So any limitations starlink has now on bandwidth or number of customers served will probably be solved in the coming years due to the exponential nature of networking tech. I also do want to point out that although some of SpaceX's technology isn't revolutionary, a lot of it is because the launch cost is so much cheaper. Our university was able to send a small satellite to space for $50,000 a few years back. Some of the old commercially viable satellites cost several hundred million dollars in launch costs adjusted for inflation. OP either doesn't know what they're talking about or is making disingenuous arguments. Launching satellites has never been faster, cheaper, or easier, and it is in large part (but not entirely) to SpaceX and companies like SpaceX. Government and universities can do more long-term research projects then the private sector likes to focus on, but in terms of making things cheap, decent, and convenient, governments have always been terrible at that.
“Reusable rockets were around prior” What other company / government agency made a reusable orbital class rocket before SpaceX?
Bs on the starlink rant. I live a mile from comcast and they want a million to run comcast to my neighborhood so that ain't happening. Starlink is the only option! Have you ever had hughes or viasat? They suck ballz. You can litterly assume all those geo stationary customers are moving to starlink. And starlink has reduced the cost of equipment massively and last I checked they are now profitable. Im sure someone else called out your space x bs. I hate elon as well but as far as these 2 companies go they are doing just fine and musk doesn't really have that much control of either of them.
Guess I need to post to everyone commenting that starlink sucks and is basically viasat, it's not. Starlink is leo and it's speeds destroy viasat which is geo synchronous and like 22,000 miles from earth. They aren't comparable at all and starlink is stealing all of viasats and hughes customers. Im only a few miles from a big town and I cannot get fiber or even cable and I'm not alone. There are plenty of customers for starlink and it's finally just turned a profit so if you don't know anything about starlink just don't comment. Elmo is a massive dipshit but that doesn't mean starlink and space x aren't good companies. I'm pretty sure those companies are distancing them selves from elmo.
You have any sources to back this up or are you just talking out of your ass? Musk is douche which is why i follow this thread, but I also follow SpaceX very very closely and this just simply doesn’t line up. It’s painful when people cannot accept someone they hate can do something good. SpaceX is absolutely crushing their competition, flew humans 4 years before Boeing (both being awarded the contract at the same time with Boeing having the obvious advantage of being an established aerospace company and getting more federal money for their capsule), and has something like 300 successful Falcon 9 launches in a row. Don’t let hate blind you
Yes, my title and description were inaccurate. I should have amended that. Really, the problem is in Starlink, which is the backbone of SpaceX for funding. (NASA isn't going to keep pumping more money forever. Especially not the trillion + for Musk's Mars fantasy. They'll be lucky if their awards can get Starship finished at around 1 billion per test launch). There's still plenty of reason to think Starlink won't make it. It's hard to know the true math right now. But many analysts don't see it adding up. Maybe they'll scratch by with enough demand from their military contracts. That'll still be a far cry from the lofty goals Musk promises.