alt Hacker NewsProbably a good idea to do it now, because Trump has made sure SpaceX is about to have yet another European, a Chinese and an Indian competitor soon. 2 out of 3 have already demonstrated landing a rocket, as has Blue origin in the US with the New Glenn launch + landing. Plus a few countries are thinking about it, at least Switzerland, South Korea and Israel if you can believe it.
Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor (by approving the feature on "old" satellites), and China is already doing launches and theirs should be at least partially operational. Russia claims to have a working Starlink competitor and India is building one.
Oh and as for profitability ... not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium, but that was far from the only attempt+bankruptcy building Space internet. Well, the economics are discussed in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y
TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com "We lose on every sale but make it up on volume" style move. So yes, high time to sell the stock indeed.
Oh, and Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars and will be the first private company getting a payload to Mars soon (the "ESCAPADE" mission). As in payload is on the way and there's no way SpaceX can catch up anymore. In fact it's pretty tough finding another rocket manufacturer that has not launched a mission to Mars. Boeing has launched payloads to Mars. Blue origin has. Arianespace has. Russia has. Not especially economically relevant* but worth mentioning. Economics are not what determines either rocket building or launches and hasn't ever done so. Which means rocket launches are cheaper than they can be in private hands.
* what is economically relevant though is that SpaceX is not even saving the US government money. The US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program. Everyone always makes the point that SpaceX is cheaper than SLS. However ... this fails to correctly compare prices for the only options the US government has:
Option 1: pay for SLS
Option 2: pay for SLS and SpaceX.
So really the price of SpaceX rocket launches doesn't even matter, not using SpaceX will be the cheapest option because math.
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Option 1 isn’t really an option, unfortunately. There are no viable single launch options using it. So it’s really SLS x 2. But building and launching one SLS at a time is almost too much as it is. If that’s the only option, I think Artemis is dead and we should start over.
> Plus Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars
What about that Tesla that regularly crosses Mars orbit? Ok, it's not on Mars, but it was just about calculating an orbit. They could have smashed it on Mars as well.
Ridiculous. SpaceX offers a product that costs far less than its competitors while being as good or better in most respects. Their profit margins on launches must be enormous at this point.
That in turn enables Starlink. They can put up thousands of satellites very cheaply. Then they can turn around and sell subscriptions. Starlink has about 8 million active customers. At $40+/month, that's at least $4 billion/year in revenue. Probably a lot more. Given their launch costs, that's a ton of profit.
"not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before" is just... not true. Nothing like it was ever tried before. Iridium is the only one that came even vaguely close, and it was still a radically different type of service. Iridium was extremely low capacity phone service, then low-bandwidth (it made dialup look super fast by comparison) data, with a network of a few dozen satellites covering the globe. It could not support many customers because it had few satellites. It also had to pay for launches in the 1990s, so an order of magnitude or more costlier. That means that it was enormously expensive, for a product few people actually needed. Handsets cost thousands of dollars, then you got to pay several dollars per minute on top of that.
Iridium was basically space dialup, and extremely expensive space dialup at that. Starlink is space broadband, and their cheap launch costs and other technological advancements mean the service is profitable at a competitive price point.
Yep, he is desperate for cash, he is leveraged to the hilt on his shares which is why he desperately begs his fanboys for more. His empire is a house of cards.
Every time someone mentions Eutelsat as a competitor I'm reminded that my own friend group has multiple people who can simply buy the entire company, which sort of describes how successful it is.
Option 1 isn't an option, really. NSSL policy is to ensure that there are two independent providers so that Assured Access To Space can work.
> Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars
As you said, not especially relevant to a financial discussion.
> as for profitability
SpaceX is profitable.
> US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program
Being the U.S. government's prime contractor while it keeps ULA on life support is a great deal. Same for Europe and Arianespace.