331–340 of 397 posts
Its revenue will almost double again this year (2023) by looking at the number of launches[1]. Definitely the most exciting company Elon has (personal opinion) [1] https://www.spacexstats.xyz/#launchhistory-per-year
Revenue doesn't double by launching more of their own payloads
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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…
The article isn't based on information SpaceX released. The WSJ got their hands on internal financial documents.
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> The ~$5B figure is in the final para. And that still sounds like it excludes ground systems and Orion development costs. (Plus ~4 more years of ever-growing bloat, obviously.) There is a much more official and up to date figure: > We project the cost to fly a single SLS/Orion system through at least Artemis IV to be $4.1 billion per launch at a cadence of approximately one mission per year. https://oig.nasa.gov/doc…
And that's while reusing as many shuttle components as possible, including the motors and the SRBs. Kind of sad that the last living pieces of the shuttle will be dropped into the ocean and left to rust away
I know a lot of people want to get them into museums, but I suspect that every museum that really wants one already has one. And I'd suggest to you that it's much more dignified that they go out as part of a rocket launch than slowly decaying in a warehouse somewhere.
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> Price is not a good metric here you can subsidize your pricing to hell if you have budget. 1. As far as I know, no one has presented any evidence that SpaceX sells Falcon 9/H launches for less than cost. ArianeSpace used to really talk up this point, but even they've mostly given up. 2. I'm not really sure why it matters. If SpaceX can sell for less than cost at their current volume, well... good for the tax payers…
> If SpaceX can sell for less than cost at their current volume, well... good for the tax payers - we're getting a deal. At the cost of killing all other competitors and letting SpaceX monopolize so we are stuck with whatever quotes from SpaceX?
1. Are you suggesting that SpaceX will bankrupt Japan (HIII), India (GSLV/PSLV), and Europe (Ariane 6)? That seems unlikely to me.
2. There's very little evidence that SpaceX will jack up prices when they're a monopoly. I mean, they're a defacto monopoly right now (in a limited sense) with ULA transitioning to Vulcan, and ArianeGroup transitioning to Ariane 6. And their prices haven't budged.
3. The DoD (as part of NSSL) and NASA work very hard to split large contracts between multiple launch providers - effectively ensuring that there is no monopoly in US medium-heavy launch providers.
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That's complete nonsense. There is a lot of evidence that Musk makes all the important decisions (like switching Starship to steel) while Shotwell seems to handle mostly day-to-day business. Moreover, Shotwell has, as far as I know, not actually founded any successful companies, while Musk has.
Musk is chief engineer - he makes engineering decisions at SpaceX and has a reputation for mostly making good ones
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Elon had tens of millions of dollars before starting Tesla. He risked all of it to start Tesla and SpaceX.
Actually SpaceX was 85% government funded according to the guy who gave him the money, Michael D. Griffin. This was front-loaded. Private money was never at risk.
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The point of SLS is pork, full stop.
SLS is about maintaining the ability of the US to build rocket engines like the RS-25 and those massive SRBs. The Government is worried about waking up some morning and China has leapfrogged us to the Moon and it'll take 20 years for us to institutionally remember how to get back there. And SpaceX has not yet demonstrated the ability to land humans on the Moon while NASA has. They're making sure that we can definitel…
> SLS is about maintaining the ability of the US to build rocket engines like the RS-25 and those massive SRBs
...but why? They're expensive and bad. Maybe the US SHOULD forget about them.
> The Government is worried about waking up some morning and China has leapfrogged us to the Moon and it'll take 20 years for us to institutionally remember how to get back there.
The SLS was indeed created back when this sounded reasonable. But it no longer does. The US can go to the moon now. They just have to pay SpaceX to do it, and failing that, Rocket Lab. But asking Boeing to do it is pretty guaranteed to be a bad idea.
> And SpaceX has not yet demonstrated the ability to land humans on the Moon while NASA has.
Boeing has demonstrated a willingness to not live up to its former glory though. And let's be honest here, this is not NASA vs SpaceX. This is Boeing vs SpaceX. That's the main contractor doing the vast majority of the work. Boeing, as you might remember, STILL haven't shown then can get humans to the ISS anymore! We are still waiting for Starliner to come online.
> They're making sure that we can definitely still use big dumb stupid expensive technology to get there.
I guess...
> If Starship works they may wind up pivoting away from SLS in the future
We can only hope! But again, Falcon Heavy exists NOW.
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I mean, not all the credit. She might be brilliant, but she's worked other space jobs before. So clearly whatever company Musk has created, has allowed her to actually showcase her brilliance. CEO sets the vision. Without vision, even perfect execution is pointless.
"clearly" is doing so much heavy lifting for you it puts both starship and sls to shame... If you have evidence to support that takeaway I'd love to see it. I don't have evidence one way or the other, though I have seen unconfirmed scuttlebutt that SpaceX is successful _despite_ Musk, in no small part due to actively distracting and babysitting him to prevent him from meddling
Yes Musk is a-hole. He has totally bungled Twitter, and he has made the entire world hate him. But let's give credit where credit is due. He has started not one but TWO "impossible" companies.
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> if they didn’t burn their own money to lunch hundreds of starlinks, their growth in launches would be pretty flat False. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aoRFnOFX_CzxTTOFLl8h... Note that this significantly understates market growth because Amazon's 83 launch deal did not include SpaceX, as Starlink is a competitor.
Why don’t you present data that supports your statement? Weight to orbit isn’t number of lunches. They’ve been doing around 30 per year, for paying customer, for many years now. And one of deals may push it higher, like Amazon, but so far they didn’t show ability to sustainably grow the whole market.
> They’ve been doing around 30 per year
(N+1 means N dedicated launches, plus 1 Starlink rideshare.)
This is pure invention. They've done 24+1 this year, putting them on pace for 33+1 to 34+2 — the schedule is for 46+1, but there are always customer delays. They did 27+2 last year. Then 14+2 before that, then 12+1, then 11. There was a small one-time launch glut in 2016-2017, when they were emptying the built-up commercial backlog other providers had underserved, but that's 18 and 21 launches, still much lower than their current run rate, and you can hardly blame satellite providers for taking a few years to adapt to build their new satellites.
We saw the same thing play out with Falcon Heavy, for example. After its initial flights, it was left without a lot to do. Only very recently have the satellites built for its capabilities shown up, and in the last 12 months it has flown 4 times, with yet two more planned for this year alone.
On the Falcon Heavy point, we're also seeing new valuable launch niches, with not just Heavy flying regularly, but an increase in commercial crewed launch too. Transporter flights are not especially expensive but they're clearly a valuable market that could not exist without SpaceX.
> And one of deals may push it higher, like Amazon, but so far they didn’t show ability to sustainably grow the whole market.
The pretense that an 89 launch deal for a long-lived constellation isn't growing the market is nonsense. That's like 10 years of flights at ULA's heyday, from one customer's initial launch deal alone.