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SpaceX files to go public

nytimes.com

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Re: SpaceX files to go public

#531

Post by Betelbuddy »

niklasd wrote: post #517
superjan wrote: post #39

Patrick Boyle (fund manager, professor, youtuber) recently discussed this IPO on his channel. Informative and entertaining. https://youtu.be/8rS3fTbC7TE?is=TGpEdM2Y7sknP-cW

I found his take on the space data center a bit negative. No idea if it is feasible right now, but you could have made the same jokes and ridicule about the feasibility of electric cars (batteries too weak!) before Elon build Tesla. And Patrick just lists some reasons why it is currently hard to do. I'm by no means a Elon fan, but if anyone could pull it of it's him, and attempting these hard challenges is a good thi…

A space data center is a technical impossibility. And your hero is an idiot, as you can see here when he explains cooling, at the end of the video: https://youtu.be/trgn7s5-YHc

>> before Elon build Tesla.

He bought the company, they already had electric cars.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#532

Post by triceratops »

edgyquant wrote: post #487
triceratops wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a space-based alternative that serves areas carriers have no financial incentive to cover In a nutshell: they're serving a market that has less money to spend using more expensive tech than the current industry leaders. Maybe I'm wrong but it doesn't scream "massive profit".

It’s already profitable

Profitable-profitable or EBITDA-profitable? https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spacex-generated-ab...

I don't mean this as a gotcha or anything. I imagine rockets are a capital-intensive business. So are datacenters.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#533

Post by fwip »

tristanj wrote: post #278
fwip wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And having a colony on Mars will be profitable because of...?

Was the British colonization and funding of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia profitable? All three colonies were not profitable for decades after their formation. Yet looking back, colonialism was probably the most profitable venture ever undertaken. All three of them ended up becoming key allies and instrumental trading partners. Think on a longer time scale.

All of those places had valuable resources for extraction. That was the whole basis for their colonization. The whole basis of colonialism, itself.

Mars has a lot of rocks.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#535

Post by shagie »

ericd wrote: post #220
pilgrim0 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a synonym for impossible. As far as the latest serious analyses have shown, data centers in space are a pipe dream. Starlink’s total addressable market was also shown to be way smaller than expected. The IPO in this case just signals they’re desperate for liquidity and with no clear path to profitability, if you discount unlikely, major breakthroughs happening very soon. They’re changing the rules of stock i…

Could you link to those serious analyses? The ones I've seen don't portray it as a total impossibility? Scott Manley did a runthrough that seemed reasonably positive on the possibility.

The bit that I wasn't entirely sold on with his analysis was that he was working on 1 satellite per rack

https://youtu.be/FlQYU3m1e80?si=nUMhO-lDny_VpG0D&t=1065

(YouTube auto transcribe)

> ... but how do you scale this up right 20 kow used to be enough to power a full rack of computer gear but we're seeing predictions now of 100 kilowatts per rack and that's just one rack in a data center racks right the 48U 19in rack which is you know big and it's just dense with computers how does that fit into a flat satellite well it turns out that like 19in rack is about 50 cm wide it's about 1 m deep per unit and if you've got a 24 1/2 square meter satellite and you take all your one U units and stack them ...

One rack per satellite doesn't seem like it is that compelling of a story.

Put a 100 kW rack in my basement in the winter and hook up the power and I'll be happy to deal with the waste heat for several months (and then ship it to somewhere in the southern hemisphere).

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#536

Post by indoordin0saur »

drzaiusx11 wrote: post #513
indoordin0saur wrote: post #113

SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x. They launch, land and re-use their rockets so often now that what was considered impossible 15 years ago is now routine. They currently put more things into space than the rest of the world combined and by a huge margin. They also have the most advanced intern…

At some point we'll reach saturation of what we're comfortable putting into LEO, or at least greater pushback from governments leading to regulations in hopes of avoiding that. There's a lot of space junk out there already and they're still pumping out those isp satellites en mass. Luckily these specific spacex LEO sats decay pretty rapidly (unless they've made them more advanced recently, I haven't followed closely…

They decay out of orbit by design

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#537

Post by venusenvy47 »

damnitbuilds wrote: post #445
laughing_man wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink seems like a no-brainer at this late date, but I remember thinking "He'll never be able to make money from internet satellites. This has to be some kind of scam. Look what happened to Irridium." Data centers in orbit certainly seem like a pipe dream, but SpaceX certainly has the technology it needs to put them there, and that's a huge competitive advantage (like it was for Starlink) if they do turn out to be…

I'd like to see lists of "Things Elon Musk will never be able to make money from, but did" and "Things Elon Musk will never be able to make money from, and didn't".

Short list: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/elon-musk...

longer list: https://elonmusk.today/

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#538

Post by indoordin0saur »

mbix77 wrote: post #376
indoordin0saur wrote: post #113

SpaceX has reduced the cost of getting a ton of mass into orbit by a factor of 10 and with their new system (Starship) it's poised further reduce that to 100x. They launch, land and re-use their rockets so often now that what was considered impossible 15 years ago is now routine. They currently put more things into space than the rest of the world combined and by a huge margin. They also have the most advanced intern…

All your comments are about Elon Musk. Weird.

The last few were but they were all in regards to this front page news story

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#539

Post by telotortium »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #510
telotortium wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m flying for work and Starlink is that much better, quite possibly. My wife’s experience with other in-flight WiFi providers has been quite poor, often to the point that it barely works. Having said that, neither of us has been on a flight with Starlink yet.

Which airline? Airlines have been moving away from land based WiFi to much faster satellite WiFi for years

In this case, it was United, almost all transpacific flights. I've read that United has started to move to Starlink, but only on a few flights so far.

Re: SpaceX files to go public

#540

Post by wilkommen »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #321
keeda wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their technical accomplishments are doubtlessly notable, but does the expected business growth justify this valuation? Honest question, how many things do we really need to send up there that reducing the cost to orbit by 100x will trigger Jevon's paradox and lead to 100x more launches? I suppose "data centers in space" is the current answer but again, I'm suspicious about its feasibility. Barring that, until we have…

Personally, I think that valuing businesses by their expected growth is doing really bad things to our society. We used to value businesses by their current returns, usually dividends paid to shareholders. And we treated any statements about their future plans as interesting but not something anyone should trust. Now we value stocks on what their price will do in the near future, because the primary return to shareho…

I agree - I think there should be a rule that prevents anyone who buys a stock from selling it inside the following 2 years or so. And another rule that says every stock must pay a dividend that is a fixed percentage of the company's profit, modifiable only rarely and only by the board of directors. Then anyone buying stocks would have to price them more by the actual present-day dividends and strength of the company in the present day than by what someone else might buy the stock for tomorrow. It would curb speculation and reward responsible companies that are building strength for the long term.
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