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The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

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Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#61

Post by ben_w »

adastra22 wrote: post #52
ben_w wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if you think, as Morgan Stanley seems to, that the only money to be made in space is selling launch of earth orbiting satellites, you’re going to miss out on the boom that is going to make the first quadrillionaire. I was with you up to this point. Quadrillionaire? Seriously? On species-wide economy of 0.1Q/year? On a timescale short enough that SpaceX remains a coherent entity and you don't have to account for…

The material wealth of the Earth is only a small, small fraction of the accessible material in the inner solar system, let alone the universe. Starship fundamentally changes the game in ways people aren’t paying attention to because it pattern matches to sci-fi. But the economics are real: power and material far beyond what is available on Earth, on many cases at lower marginal price than terrestrial sources, and 100…

> The material wealth of the Earth is only a small, small fraction of the accessible material in the inner solar system, let alone the universe.

And you think you can access that in 30 years?

That's the problem here. Market valuations for, say, the USA, do not count the entire value of the nickel and iron down to the planet's core.

> Starship fundamentally changes the game in ways people aren’t paying attention to because it pattern matches to sci-fi. But the economics are real: power and material far beyond what is available on Earth, on many cases at lower marginal price than terrestrial sources, and 1000x to 100000x reserves.

No, it doesn't. I've done the maths here. At best, and with a better track record than Musk has actually demonstrated, if we use the USA as a metaphor for a the K2 civilisation Musk talks about with lunar-tiling factories making nothing but data centre satellites (done the maths on that too, that's what it would take and even then be borderline on thermodynamics grounds), Starship can be the Mayflower. Not even the Oregon Trail, certainly not the railroad network.

And fundamentally it isn't coherent to talk about "lower marginal price" when space mining has a TRL of 1 or 2. Might be cheap eventually, but pricing that in right now would be an error of judgment (aside from anything else, the tech to make it cheap may also make stuff here cheaper).

The only way this happens in my lifetime, and I'm younger than Musk, is if someone solves for von Neumann replicators. Which I won't rule out, but Musk hasn't demonstrated any special sauce for this to make me think he'd do it before anyone else.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#62

Post by ben_w »

aczerepinski wrote: post #34
ben_w wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if you think, as Morgan Stanley seems to, that the only money to be made in space is selling launch of earth orbiting satellites, you’re going to miss out on the boom that is going to make the first quadrillionaire. I was with you up to this point. Quadrillionaire? Seriously? On species-wide economy of 0.1Q/year? On a timescale short enough that SpaceX remains a coherent entity and you don't have to account for…

Can’t rule out hyperinflation doing some heavy lifting :)

Yeah, indeed, I was assuming in constant today-dollars. :)

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#63

Post by piva00 »

trothamel wrote: post #44
piva00 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very drastically, the ISS solar panels can generate up to 120kW of power, look at the size of its radiators needed to cool it down. Scaling that to the hundreds of GW range is quite laughable.

https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2064108916611420273?lang=... While I'd suspect the design is still in flux, the current design is for a 120kw satellite with 110 square meters of radiators. Scaling to hundreds of gigawatts is intended to be by repeatedly launching smaller designs.

300GW / 120kW = 2.5 million satellites, I don't think SpaceX can launch 2.5 million satellites. Even less keep replenishing all the ones needing decommissioning after 3-5 years, no maintenance can be made, so on and so forth.

It's ridiculous anyway you cut it, it's a pipe dream.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#64

Post by saalweachter »

antonvs wrote: post #45
zpeti wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without doing a google search - optical fibers factories and pharma factories can deliver higher quality products when built in space. And I bet there are hundreds of other examples. Just because launch costs were high and these weren't viable before, doesn't mean they won't be viable now.

> optical fibers factories and pharma factories can deliver higher quality products when built in space Those seem like classic examples of what you get when you have a solution in search of problems. What’s the monetary value of the incremental improvements in those products, and how does it compare to the cost of setting up and operating manufacturing facilities in orbit?

And what could you get quality-wise if you poured an equivalent amount of money into improving ground based factories?

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#65

Post by ben_w »

stoneman24 wrote: post #35
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SpaceX started moving into their own constellations because lower prices open up new markets, and this lets them access those markets without having to lower launch prices the alternate take here is that even at current prices, falcon 9 is more than capable of completely filling space demand which makes building a >10x bigger vehicle seem kind of dumb

I think the main idea for starship is fully reusable ( which falcon 9 isn’t) and much larger capacity (both volume and mass). Driving down the cost of getting mass to orbit. I googled and got the following costs per kg to orbit Falcon approx $3000 / kg Starship (early) $600 / kg Starship (target) $ 100 / kg If they can achieve the target, it’s transformative. The Chinese will follow the lead and be available for some…

Starship would be really good even if they can't make it reusable, but still hit the early-user price tags and capacity to LEO they're talking about for expendable-mode launches, even if they then stop improving.

But unless there's demand for launching a lot more stuff, that's not going to help them make a lot of money.

I can buy into a vision of several competing Starlink-like constellations. Can't buy into one about space-based data centres. And we need a lot more demonstrations of space colony precursor tech before I'm going to even have a strong opinion about the economics of space colonies*, either for or against: they're technically feasible, but so too is one on the sea floor, or the middle of Antarctica; and there's people who already build homes for themselves in the middle of the Sahara and at high altitude on mountains, but these aren't *huge* money-makers, just standard boring ones.

* they are cool though; if Musk had actually delivered on the Mars flights that were supposed to have already arrived two years ago, and also not turned out to be who he turned out to be, I'd have considered being an early Martian: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/01/elon-musk-says-spacex-will...

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#66

Post by panick21_ »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #21
adastra22 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my industry I know it well, apparently much better than these bozos. SpaceX launch is only “unprofitable” only in the accounting sense because they reinvest their profits into Starship. Their actual profit margin for launch of F9 is 62% - 80% depending on configuration. That is a margin unheard of in aerospace. There is literally no competition worth speaking of, and nobody to provide downward price pressure.…

China and other competitors have other ideas, even if you're not aware of them. When your whole pitch is that you're commoditising a technology, don't be surprised when you get a commoditised market.

You clearly don't know the market. China is no competition just on geopolitical terms. And I am very aware of the competition and have followed each competitor basically since its founding. It will take many years before competitors will be fully read and even then their launch rates will be tiny in comparison. And by then SpaceX will have moved on.

But of course this is all dwarfed by AI stuff financially so its basically irrelevant. SpaceX could stop all launch sales tomorrow with zero impact on its financials.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#67

Post by panick21_ »

zpeti wrote: post #29
XorNot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There just isn't that much demand for space. Space is cool to nerds like me, but what do I really need from it? I've got all the navigation satellites I could want (which I don't pay for) and the best satellite imagery I use is still hyperspectral airborne imagery. Now, of course that's not the full story but the use cases get rather specific beyond that: the launch market just isn't actually very big (afaik $30 bill…

Without doing a google search - optical fibers factories and pharma factories can deliver higher quality products when built in space. And I bet there are hundreds of other examples. Just because launch costs were high and these weren't viable before, doesn't mean they won't be viable now.

But here is the thing, optical fiber factories in space are unproven and launch cost is only one of the difficulties with it. You need to launch it, and recover it, and then feed it into post processing all for the lower cost then doing it on earth. And even if you capture that market, how big is it?

For pharma, its not universally true. There are few things that can be done better in space, but by far not everything. Research in space makes more sense then actual production. Again even the best case is hard to see how its going to justify the valuation.

> And I bet there are hundreds of other examples.

Hundreds of other even more half baked examples. You need to account for launch cost, space constraints, space environment, landing and recovery. We have been doing this for 40 years and the medicine and fiber are things that have been talked about for 30 years at least.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#68

Post by panick21_ »

ben_w wrote: post #7

My draft blog post about all the things that are up with space data centres keeps getting bigger and bigger. "The other half of the MS model is data centres. “Orbital compute deployments” start in 2028, reach cost parity with their earthbound equivalents by 2031, and put 364GW of rigs in space by 2040." With 25% efficient cells, at 500 km altitude, in a terminator-tracing SSO, this is enough to occupy a *contiguous*…

The cost of fuel is not the problem. We have unlimited uranium and thorium, and there is no reason a fusion should be cheaper. Sure its more dense then fission but fission is absurdly dense already and the economics don't improve that much.

The idea that it makes sense to use moon based He3 compared to using thorium that is already mined in waste quantities is absurd. Thorium is free energy already and the machine that turns it into energy is simpler the any fusion reactor we can come up with.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#69

Post by ben_w »

ubercore wrote: post #32
ben_w wrote: post #7

My draft blog post about all the things that are up with space data centres keeps getting bigger and bigger. "The other half of the MS model is data centres. “Orbital compute deployments” start in 2028, reach cost parity with their earthbound equivalents by 2031, and put 364GW of rigs in space by 2040." With 25% efficient cells, at 500 km altitude, in a terminator-tracing SSO, this is enough to occupy a *contiguous*…

I just skimmed that linked paper. Only mention I found of cooling is: > Cooling would be achieved through a thermal sys- tem of heat pipes and radiators while operating at nominal temperatures. Isn't that drastically underselling potentially one of the harder parts of this whole endeavor?

> Isn't that drastically underselling potentially one of the harder parts of this whole endeavor?

Everything in space is hard; but these are Alphabet researchers not NASA researchers, and honestly even the NASA papers I've been skimming through have a lot of simplifying assumptions in them, so that's not something to hold against them here.

They are just saying when they think it's worth considering, after all, not giving a detailed all-aspect proposal for how to make one.

Re: The space bit of SpaceX is worth $8 a share, says Morgan Stanley

#70

Post by ben_w »

piva00 wrote: post #63
trothamel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2064108916611420273?lang=... While I'd suspect the design is still in flux, the current design is for a 120kw satellite with 110 square meters of radiators. Scaling to hundreds of gigawatts is intended to be by repeatedly launching smaller designs.

300GW / 120kW = 2.5 million satellites, I don't think SpaceX can launch 2.5 million satellites. Even less keep replenishing all the ones needing decommissioning after 3-5 years, no maintenance can be made, so on and so forth. It's ridiculous anyway you cut it, it's a pipe dream.

Indeed; though one thing I've found researching this is that the exact numbers are all over the place, so for some it's "let's make a single giant DC" and others are "let's make one million small ones", with mass estimates for each bird in the bigger constellations varying from 1200 kg (at 120 kW, which is an absurd ratio) to about 8000 kg.

Like I said higher up, at this scale, if you want to make your own fantasy plan you can draw a contiguous ring filling a single orbit.

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