alt Hacker News> Starship at $170B is pure option value on technology still in advanced testing.
The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go.
But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided precision of the entire stack, this is becoming a tired argument.
I know the author is not making that case at all here, but it seems like one the core reasons to undervalue SpaceX is that Starship might not work out, and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago.
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The booster is definitely looking good, just like the Falcon 9 booster is very reliable. The big question for me is the upper stage, and whether they will be able to reuse anywhere near as often as they claim. It is so much more complex than the Falcon upper stages, which aren't reusable very quickly. It seems they have a lot to learn about upper stage reusability.
Yeah, I might have stated this poorly. In the forecast it's just a question of expected value, I don't give almost any probability to "Starship is worthless".
My 50% CI on Starship's fair market value at IPO time is $123b - $227b, with a 80% CI even wider, not based on my own modeling, but based on anchoring to analysts that give credible arguments.
> and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out at all for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago
I think a lot of it depends on whether they can make the reuse of the second stage work without having to redo stuff constantly like the shuttle. Reusing the booster will obviously save tons of money and make launches cheaper, but they're competing with themselves here. How big is the launch market with cheaper launches? We don't actually know.
The viability of direct to cell connectivity at scale is unproven. This is actually the core value of SpaceX in the next 3-5 years.
The other core value generation product will be financial transactions. It is unproven whether X money will be adopted for friction free transactions across national boundaries and whether the company can compete in the financial services sector.
How are they doing with their mass to orbit projections?
The tower catches are great, but the payload rating has been reduced several times now[1] and with it the economic argument for how Starship will make launching much cheaper than today as well as suitability for lunar/Mars launches. For Starship to be revolutionary enough for this kind of valuation it has to not just work, but outperform current solutions.
SpaceX has basically admitted as much by promising Starship 2 & 3 with larger payloads (that Starship 1 was already supposed to deliver).
[1] https://www.americaspace.com/2024/04/20/starship-faces-perfo...
Compared to Falcon 9 Starship has still more quality issues than the Falcon 9 at the same test stage
They caught it 3 times already!?
I missed 2 and 3 it seems.
The question is not even whether or not Starship works. Starship is, in theory, designed with the idea of getting many, many payloads to Mars. However, getting payloads to Mars is not currently something that anyone is paying for; even NASA isn't going to focus on Mars for at least another decade (likely more). And in the meantime, it's not like we don't have rockets capable of getting payloads to Mars (the Saturn V was fully capable of doing so in the 60s). Likewise in the meantime, the Artemis plans that look to require a dozen+ launches for a single moonshot aren't painting Starship in a favorable light.
So what is the near-to-medium-term economic prospect of Starship? That's the question. You can't just say "bigger rocket make more money", because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice. To use an analogy, we have jumbo jets, but most flights are not on jumbo jets.