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A look into the finances of SpaceX

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Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#251

Post by mcpackieh »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #192
pfdietz wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SLS is needed only because they were not allowed to adopt on-orbit propellant transfer. With rockets like the Falcons, propellant (which is most of the mass needed to get something to the moon) is launched in smaller quantities and accumulated. What sort of future in space do those advocating SLS imagine for us if moving a liquid from one tank to another is too challenging?

One where we just launch one rocket instead of building a giant orbital bomb slowly (accumulating fuel) and transferring all those explosives through a complex series of difficult rendezvous maneuvers? One rocket is risky enough. There's a huge amount of extra risk involved in that sort of idea, which is why NASA isn't doing it, which can just be avoided with SLS and Starship.

There's no reason to have humans on board while transferring fuel, the risk to human life from this "giant orbital bomb" (ridiculous fear mongering) is nonexistent. Anyway, the whole thing is a pointless waste of time and money. The only non-pork reason to return to the Moon is to blunt the impact of the PRC doing the same (should that happen.)

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#252

Post by NovaDudely »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #147
htss2013 wrote: post #140

Isn't it amazing that you can become the richest person in the world by building companies that lose money? By lose money I mean all money ever put into the company versus profits made. The idea of creating a profitless company that somehow makes you personally rich used to be thought of as a fluke. Yes it's possible but it shouldn't happen and aside from extreme luck it won't. Something has changed. Losing money and…

Not sure why this is being upvoted. They are launching mass into space at between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude lower cost than anyone else. The R+D costs on that is insane. And they are almost profitable. I 100% agree that du-jour saas companies raising 300MM on limited revenue is one thing, but this is not the same.

1 to 2 orders of magnitude? ... Falcon Heavy launches nowadays run at approximately $40-70 million each. So you are implying that others cost minimum $400 to $4 billion per launch! I mean that is still 1/100th the Saturn V but SpaceX hasn't improved the overall costs that much. An improvement, yes, but no where near what they claim.

This is really my only complaint about Space X. I wish they would stop trying to be this somewhat unrealistic hype machine. What they are doing nowadays is amazing - that should be enough!

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#253

Post by yazaddaruvala »

avmich wrote: post #200
fooker wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you recon Spacex has managed to recruit several thousand US citizens with the proper expertise? These people don’t grow on trees(/classrooms).

Surprisingly NASA, or ULA, couldn't recruit those very same citizens.

I think you’re missing the point.

NASA and ULA like programs trained and built expert training to create those citizens.

Being able to recruit them is a non-goal.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#254

Post by reso »

resolutebat wrote: post #126
reso wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't compare falcon to SLS because Falcon cannot do what SLS does. You can't compare SpaceX's figures to NASA because NASA has many, many more reporting obligations than SpaceX. Every report on Falcon 9 costs has made this mistake forever. SpaceX does not release their full costs. What numbers we have for them are PR releases. Meanwhile, NASA's budgets are public and comprehensive, and they have legal parameters…

At time of writing, it's the opposite: Falcon is launching humans into space on a regular basis, something SLS has entirely failed to do to date.

They have fundamentally different purposes, and so soundbite comparisons between them are meaningless.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#255

Post by misiti3780 »

JumpinJack_Cash wrote: post #221
misiti3780 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla doesnt lose money. It has been profitable for the past 14 quarters in a row. SpaceX clearly could be profitable if it wanted to be, and it clearly will be in the future. It will probably be very profitable. Most tech companies lose money before they make money. Amazon lost a shitload of money before it started turning a profit, now Jeff Bezos is the 2nd richest person in the world.

> > Amazon lost a shitload of money before it started turning a profit Amazon businss model was/is based on selling books/toys etc. online. Basically Walmart but online + obsession over customer and improving the quality of life of the customer + AWS Cloud. Tesla business model is based on the political choice to do away with fossil fuels. They aren't the same. Tesla is the product of a centrally planned economy beca…

How does this refute my point?

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#256

Post by alemanek »

HWR_14 wrote: post #237
bell-cot wrote: post #35

From Reuters... > In 2022, revenue doubled to $4.6 billion, helping the company reduce its loss last year to $559 million from $968 million, the WSJ reported. > The company reported about $5.2 billion in total expenses for 2022, up from $3.3 billion the year earlier, according to the report. That $5.2B of expenses got 61 successful, production Falcon rocket launches in 2022. Vs. some pretty-reasonable estimates put t…

That ~$5billion per launch includes a lot of amortized R&D and other costs that you are not counting in the 61 successful Falcon launches. It may be that the Falcon launchers are significantly cheaper, but the accounting methods are too different to just compare numbers.

Your right that figure isn’t accounting for the $23.8 billion cost of the program so far. That $5billion per launch figure is based on an optimistic number of SLS launches which haven’t happened yet.

SLS and Orion are dead ends. I wish them well and I am huge space geek but that program is just a gigantic waste. I wish we could take that budget and use it for unmanned missions or public/private space station partnerships with some of the new space companies.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#258

Post by NovaDudely »

entropicgravity wrote: post #223

Don't worry about SpaceX, it's now an essential part of the US military. Without SpaceX's satellite internet the war in Ukraine would have been much hard to deal with. SpaceX's capacity to launch rockets two or three times a week is something the US military is war gaming around, never mind the same thing but soon with the Starship. SpaceX is in good hands just as its increasing enterprise value shows.

Bingo! Now that they are a key part of the industrial complex, good money can be thrown at bad and it will all still work out.

Not saying that is what they are doing but they are now in a key position that big mistakes are not necessarily fatal to the company.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#259

Post by reso »

wmf wrote: post #116
reso wrote: post #109

Isn't most of this Starlink, which is basically SpaceX self-dealing? Can someone point me to a breakdown of launches and customers?

I don't think they can book Starlink launches as revenue. Of course Starlink has >$1B of legitimate subscriber revenue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

I suspect that SpaceX is booking Starlink launches as revenue. My basis for this is that their launch revenue is growing much faster than their non-starlink launch schedule.

We can't prove or disprove this though, since their financials are secret.

Re: A look into the finances of SpaceX

#260

Post by mcpackieh »

pixl97 wrote: post #112
oblio wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous what amounts of money these ventures can siphon away in the US. See Uber, AirBNB, etc. I'm not saying they don't pay off, but these businesses literally choke most international competition. There are probably 1-2 countries in the world that can afford to keep running a business with losses at around $1bn per year.

$1b loss in the space industry is probably the smallest loss for any business in said industry in history. Every launch of the space shuttle was a few billion used up. There has been no completion here, because before SpaceX everyone else was launching 100M-1B+ of rocket that was never reused and other than the payload was a write off. It is always financed by government because there is typically a much larger gener…

> Every launch of the space shuttle was a few billion used up.

Almost all of that money was dumped back into the same economy from which it was collected, albeit inefficiently, so it didn't really disappear. They "used up" a few million dollars worth of material each time.

The damage to the economy was not as bad as you suggest. However the opportunity cost was massive. Decades wasted on a dead-end program. A staggering number of engineer careers essentially wasted, and now they're doing it again with SLS.

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