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* ring roughly 25 m tall, all the way around that orbit.
Also, from other statements they're clearly copying Alphabet's study which said cost parity in 2035, if they can actually launch 370,000 tons and maintain their learning rate.
"A $668bn funding obligation to 2034 that delivers free cash flow that year of negative $48bn sounds less than ideal, though FCF might flip positive to $138bn in 2035 if everything goes to plan, so that’s nice. The SpaceX CEO presumably has a long history of delivering products on time and to the required specification that can support such confidence."
I love the snark here.
"Helium-3 is one of the clearest examples of why lunar infrastructure could matter. The isotope is extremely rare on Earth, with current supply largely tied to tritium decay, but the Moon has accumulated helium-3 for billions of years because it lacks Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. NASA mining concepts often assume concentrations around 20 parts per billion, meaning helium-3 is abundant in total but painfully diffuse, requiring hundreds of tons of regolith to be mined and heated to recover small quantities."
Ugh. This will need a separate blog post for why it's stupid. At 20 ppb, even if we could fuse He3, that makes lunar regolith marginally less energy dense than firewood. Also, anyone with a fusion reactor can make He3, even highschool students with home-made fusors can already do this. I'll have to check sources and maths to make sure I've not missed something important about which would be cheaper, *currently existing* neutron sources like fusors or going to the moon, but regardless, we can't currently use this stuff for fusion and the moment we can we won't need to mine it.
(I have not yet formed an opinion about non-fusion uses for He3).
> 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.
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.
Pretty much. There isn't really question could you build satellite with GPUs at certain scale and launch it to space. It is certainly already doable. No special unsolved engineering challenges when you have say dozen or hundred...
Now if we are talking about thousands or millions you have some real questions. Well cost was question to start with. But at millions satellites yeah there is clear issues.
Simple rule for numbers 1 gigawatt is 1 000 megawatts or 1 000 000 kilowatts... So math is pretty simple there in estimations.
I view articles like that as a kind of roleplaying, essentially. The authors are pretending to be space hardware engineers, but the results are not remotely realistic.
I'm not very informed on SpaceX plans, but one thing I think people gloss over is how much maintenance a data center requires. Parts fail, computers get stuck on crash loops, etc. A space data center would need workers - computer people, not astronauts - and a constant supply of parts tob replace hardware. Whoever wrote this proposal doesn't understand neither space nor data centers.
Is a data center satellite really that different from a communications satellite? Starlink sats must have some significant processing power and nontrivial control system, and they work without physical maintenance. One data center sat is like one server rack, if it fails, it's fully lost and you just deorbit it, as it's done with Starlink sats. They sent 12443 Starlink sats to space, deorbited 1684. The thing that matters is failure rate, and the economics resulting from that. And also the cost of specialized resilient hardware.
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.
> I sat out the TMT bubble until they quit using the term "information superhighway," and it saved me an 80% drawdown.
> I'm sitting out the AI / chip / SpaceX [AICSX, pronounced like the wrestling shoes?] bubble until they stop using the word "compute" as if it were a noun.
> I'm guessing I'll save myself a drawdown on a similar scale.
> until they stop using the word "compute" as if it were a noun.
That’s a bit silly, since it is a noun at this point, meaning computing resources or computing capacity.
It’s nowhere near being a term similar to “information superhighway”, which was never a technical term used within the industry, it was purely used in communication mostly to the public or in government agency and contractor slide decks.
I have a hard time imagining how spx stock will drop to a reasonable price. You have to be a true believer at its current valuation, so who is going to sell? Maybe if enough insiders or stock options start selling it will drop.
Well, as I understand it, SpaceX intends to continue to raise money from the market. Eventually the true believers will stop having money to give them.
"Morgan Stanley’s sum-of-the-parts analysis tells a more nuanced story. The “Space” segment, which encompasses Falcon rockets, Dragon capsules, and the Starship program, has been bleeding money. Heavy investment in Starship development drove operating losses in that division, even as SpaceX overall reported a profit of around $8 billion on revenues between $15 and $16 billion in 2025"
In finance and so the world we live in, the value of an equity is less related to the merit of the product than the firm's capacity to generate future free cash flow. Software companies, B2B SaaS in particular, have been basically unbeatable in this regard, hence the state of the market (and our salaries) for the past few decades. Industrial firms have to use metrics like "EBITDA" to show how much cash they'd have to potentially pay to investors if they didn't have to pay so much in interest on their debt, taxes, and fixing up decaying equipment...
They're treating lift as a cost centre for the $128/share connectivity segment. (X and Grok being worth $12/share is debatable. Enterprise AI being worth $150+ speaks for itself as nonsense.)
"Starting with the reusable rockets, MS expects SpaceX to eat itself. Launch costs will collapse by more than 99 per cent versus their historical average within 10 years, it says. Operating margin on launches will have jumped to about 40 per cent, from around negative 50 per cent currently, but 40 per cent of less than 1 per cent still isn’t very much."
Though as someone (probably JumpCrisscross, can't remember) pointed out a previous time this came up, as SpaceX is selling launch to Starlink, and also own Starlink, which one of the two gets to count as making a profit or a loss is just a matter of preference.
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. 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.
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.
China (and others, e.g. Blue Origin and Rocket Lab) are rushing to catch up to where SoaceX was 10 years ago. They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.
SpaceX and NVIDIA share this trait. They out-innovate, and know only one speed: the speed of light. The tortoise can only beat the hare if the hare takes a nap, and nobody is napping at SpaceX.
I’m not a fanboy. I have criticisms of SpaceX. But you are pattern matching to the common story of startups getting complacent and being surpassed by up-comers in China and elsewhere. But the innovators dilemma only applies if the innovator stops innovating. Two decades on, SoaceX is still innovating as much as they always have.
> They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.
That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so.
In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use has not yet had one circularised orbit.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but at this point Starship development is currently going slower than both the historical analogs, the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle.
The best selling EV model in the world is the Model Y.
Saying "Oh but the Model Y" is like how when the original iMac came out, Apple turned out to be selling the single most popular model of retail PC in the US despite Apple also having 3% of the world market. Putting a lot of wood behind few arrows does make those arrows look bigger.
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.
> 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 things like the sum-total risk of nuclear war? Or even just of Musk dying of old age given he's 55?
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 1000x to 100000x reserves.
> 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.
> 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 commercial customers but the majority of the market will be SpaceX.
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...
How far ahead is SpaceX compared to the competition, a decade? More? Less? Is the gap closing or growing?
> Their actual profit margin for launch of F9 is 62% - 80% depending on configuration. That is a margin unheard of in aerospace.
Do you expect they maintain these margins on launch and whatever services they deliver from space as that gap is closing? Is their first mover advantage practically unassailable because it's in space? Tesla built the EV market and are having their lunch eaten by the competition.
The rest of the industry is about 10 years beyond SpaceX. But note that they are where SpaceX was a decade ago, which is not the same thing as “in 10 years they will catch up.” The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller.
> The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller.
Why? Logically it would seem that learning how to do something that's already been done would be easier than discovering it. SpaceX has already done a lot of the work and has shown the others that it's possible and how they do it. Why won't the others catch up? I can't think of any industry that has a market leader that only gets further away from their competition forever.
Why is it going to be huge? Who are the customers and what do they want?
I don't follow this closely, just look at the pretty pictures. If there's demand for lifting much bigger/heavier things to orbit than presently possible, I would probably not know, for lack of pretty pictures. So please tell.
Don't repeat mistakes of people that were making fun of SpaceX landing rockets before they started to land.
Starship has so much innovation in there, the raptors itself etc.
It launches, it flies, it re-enters and it lands. The engines work. The heat protection work. Even when they push it to the limits by intentionally experimenting with different heat protection, omitting tiles etc. Even when they are in R&D stage.
I believe they can make it work with little refurbishment between flights. Even if all didn't work like they planned, they still have a very, very good vehicle.
I mean something must go off the rails very very badly for the Starship NOT to enter the service.
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 billion a year).
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.
Fiber optic are currently so cheap that they are being used in expendable, single use applications in the Russia/Ukraine war in spools of 50+km.
You're talking about achieving highly marginal gains in product quality at the expense of having to launch into space literally every single part of the production process and recover it from space.
Which includes things like "ruggedizing what you launch so it can survive the launch" and "also ruggedizing it to survive the landing".
> 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?
> In our model, we estimate SpaceX raising an average of $72bn annually between 2027 and 2030 and then an average of $95bn annually between 2031 and 2034
Ah. There it is. Even if that's all done as investment-grade debt (with a 50 bp underwriting spread), that's $3+ billion of banking fees.
My draft blog post about all the things that are up with space data centres keeps getting bigger and bigger.
With 25% efficient cells, at 500 km altitude, in a terminator-tracing SSO, this is enough to occupy a *contiguous* ring roughly 25 m tall, all the way around that orbit.Also, from other statements they're clearly copying Alphabet's study which said cost parity in 2035, if they can actually launch 370,000 tons and maintain their learning rate.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19468
I love the snark here. Ugh. This will need a separate blog post for why it's stupid. At 20 ppb, even if we could fuse He3, that makes lunar regolith marginally less energy dense than firewood. Also, anyone with a fusion reactor can make He3, even highschool students with home-made fusors can already do this. I'll have to check sources and maths to make sure I've not missed something important about which would be cheaper, *currently existing* neutron sources like fusors or going to the moon, but regardless, we can't currently use this stuff for fusion and the moment we can we won't need to mine it.(I have not yet formed an opinion about non-fusion uses for He3).
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.
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.
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.
Pretty much. There isn't really question could you build satellite with GPUs at certain scale and launch it to space. It is certainly already doable. No special unsolved engineering challenges when you have say dozen or hundred...
Now if we are talking about thousands or millions you have some real questions. Well cost was question to start with. But at millions satellites yeah there is clear issues.
Simple rule for numbers 1 gigawatt is 1 000 megawatts or 1 000 000 kilowatts... So math is pretty simple there in estimations.
I view articles like that as a kind of roleplaying, essentially. The authors are pretending to be space hardware engineers, but the results are not remotely realistic.
I'm not very informed on SpaceX plans, but one thing I think people gloss over is how much maintenance a data center requires. Parts fail, computers get stuck on crash loops, etc. A space data center would need workers - computer people, not astronauts - and a constant supply of parts tob replace hardware. Whoever wrote this proposal doesn't understand neither space nor data centers.
Is a data center satellite really that different from a communications satellite? Starlink sats must have some significant processing power and nontrivial control system, and they work without physical maintenance. One data center sat is like one server rack, if it fails, it's fully lost and you just deorbit it, as it's done with Starlink sats. They sent 12443 Starlink sats to space, deorbited 1684. The thing that matters is failure rate, and the economics resulting from that. And also the cost of specialized resilient hardware.
I'm also writing a blogpost on orbital datacentres, maybe we should compare notes!
Dotnetrocks did an excellent breakdown https://www.dotnetrocks.com/details/2007
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.
He3 is needed as a cryogenic for quantum systems, not fusion fuel.
As I understand it, He3 is also used in nuclear materials detectors.
Morgan Stanley list both.
Not a coincidence that both technologies aren’t going to live up to the proponents’ claims, and both want materials we don’t really have.
Panhandler
> I sat out the TMT bubble until they quit using the term "information superhighway," and it saved me an 80% drawdown.
> I'm sitting out the AI / chip / SpaceX [AICSX, pronounced like the wrestling shoes?] bubble until they stop using the word "compute" as if it were a noun.
> I'm guessing I'll save myself a drawdown on a similar scale.
A comment under the original article.
> until they stop using the word "compute" as if it were a noun.
That’s a bit silly, since it is a noun at this point, meaning computing resources or computing capacity.
It’s nowhere near being a term similar to “information superhighway”, which was never a technical term used within the industry, it was purely used in communication mostly to the public or in government agency and contractor slide decks.
“Information Superhighway”, ha ha (and replete with billboards as we have come to find out).
As opposed, I suppose, to the library. Which is perhaps more like an information bike lane. (Or a pedestrian walkway?)
I have a hard time imagining how spx stock will drop to a reasonable price. You have to be a true believer at its current valuation, so who is going to sell? Maybe if enough insiders or stock options start selling it will drop.
Well, as I understand it, SpaceX intends to continue to raise money from the market. Eventually the true believers will stop having money to give them.
The market overall drops and large investors start shedding their pricier/riskier stocks to offset losses.
Slowly at first, then quickly.
That feels…low. They’re the only one with significant proven and operational space lift capacity
Citation:
"Morgan Stanley’s sum-of-the-parts analysis tells a more nuanced story. The “Space” segment, which encompasses Falcon rockets, Dragon capsules, and the Starship program, has been bleeding money. Heavy investment in Starship development drove operating losses in that division, even as SpaceX overall reported a profit of around $8 billion on revenues between $15 and $16 billion in 2025"
In finance and so the world we live in, the value of an equity is less related to the merit of the product than the firm's capacity to generate future free cash flow. Software companies, B2B SaaS in particular, have been basically unbeatable in this regard, hence the state of the market (and our salaries) for the past few decades. Industrial firms have to use metrics like "EBITDA" to show how much cash they'd have to potentially pay to investors if they didn't have to pay so much in interest on their debt, taxes, and fixing up decaying equipment...
They're treating lift as a cost centre for the $128/share connectivity segment. (X and Grok being worth $12/share is debatable. Enterprise AI being worth $150+ speaks for itself as nonsense.)
Space lift is not very profitable. The money comes from whatever you actually put in orbit with that lift capacity.
SpaceX’s launch services have huge margins.
Huge negative margins, according to the article:
Though as someone (probably JumpCrisscross, can't remember) pointed out a previous time this came up, as SpaceX is selling launch to Starlink, and also own Starlink, which one of the two gets to count as making a profit or a loss is just a matter of preference.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. 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.
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.
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.
China (and others, e.g. Blue Origin and Rocket Lab) are rushing to catch up to where SoaceX was 10 years ago. They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.
SpaceX and NVIDIA share this trait. They out-innovate, and know only one speed: the speed of light. The tortoise can only beat the hare if the hare takes a nap, and nobody is napping at SpaceX.
I’m not a fanboy. I have criticisms of SpaceX. But you are pattern matching to the common story of startups getting complacent and being surpassed by up-comers in China and elsewhere. But the innovators dilemma only applies if the innovator stops innovating. Two decades on, SoaceX is still innovating as much as they always have.
> They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.
That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so.
In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use has not yet had one circularised orbit.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but at this point Starship development is currently going slower than both the historical analogs, the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle.
Their lead is insurmountable, might bleed 1/2% to china but they own launch market and will do for the next century.
You’re claiming in 10 years they made something others won’t for another century? This has no historical precedent.
China is going to eat them, just like they ate Teslas insurmountable lead in a few short years.
Whats the best selling car in the world? Model Y at 4x the price of number 2. So nope, your claim died on first hurdle. Try harder
No, the best selling car in the world is the Toyota RAV4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_RAV4
The best selling EV brand in the world is BYD: https://cleantechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-03...
The best selling EV model in the world is the Model Y.
Saying "Oh but the Model Y" is like how when the original iMac came out, Apple turned out to be selling the single most popular model of retail PC in the US despite Apple also having 3% of the world market. Putting a lot of wood behind few arrows does make those arrows look bigger.
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.
> 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 things like the sum-total risk of nuclear war? Or even just of Musk dying of old age given he's 55?
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 1000x to 100000x reserves.
> 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.
In which currency? 1 billion Rupiah is less than 60,000 usd ;)
A quadrillionaire would only need $60 billion or so.
Can’t rule out hyperinflation doing some heavy lifting :)
Yeah, indeed, I was assuming in constant today-dollars. :)
> 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 commercial customers but the majority of the market will be SpaceX.
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...
> This is my industry I know it well
How far ahead is SpaceX compared to the competition, a decade? More? Less? Is the gap closing or growing?
> Their actual profit margin for launch of F9 is 62% - 80% depending on configuration. That is a margin unheard of in aerospace.
Do you expect they maintain these margins on launch and whatever services they deliver from space as that gap is closing? Is their first mover advantage practically unassailable because it's in space? Tesla built the EV market and are having their lunch eaten by the competition.
The rest of the industry is about 10 years beyond SpaceX. But note that they are where SpaceX was a decade ago, which is not the same thing as “in 10 years they will catch up.” The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller.
> The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller.
Why? Logically it would seem that learning how to do something that's already been done would be easier than discovering it. SpaceX has already done a lot of the work and has shown the others that it's possible and how they do it. Why won't the others catch up? I can't think of any industry that has a market leader that only gets further away from their competition forever.
"The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller."
You keep saying this—you'll have to explain. Very little in the world has ever worked like this—the opposite has generally been the case.
Starship is going to be huge when it's finally operational. It seems like it should be worth more than $8/shr if the potential is accounted properly.
Why is it going to be huge? Who are the customers and what do they want?
I don't follow this closely, just look at the pretty pictures. If there's demand for lifting much bigger/heavier things to orbit than presently possible, I would probably not know, for lack of pretty pictures. So please tell.
Don’t forget that SpaceX has 3.884 billion outstanding shares!
just like full self driving tm
I'm thinking of flying over on the Spruce Goose to watch the first operational launch.
> Starship is going to be huge when it's finally operational.
Any day now. Yep, real soon, honest!
Don't repeat mistakes of people that were making fun of SpaceX landing rockets before they started to land.
Starship has so much innovation in there, the raptors itself etc.
It launches, it flies, it re-enters and it lands. The engines work. The heat protection work. Even when they push it to the limits by intentionally experimenting with different heat protection, omitting tiles etc. Even when they are in R&D stage.
I believe they can make it work with little refurbishment between flights. Even if all didn't work like they planned, they still have a very, very good vehicle.
I mean something must go off the rails very very badly for the Starship NOT to enter the service.
It has to make money. The Space Shuttle was a technical marvel as well and was massively subsidized by the US taxpayer.
Falcon9 has basically no market: the only thing that keeps it flying is Starlink.
The whole AI/orbital datacentres/launch thing is a giant grift.
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 billion a year).
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.
Fiber optic are currently so cheap that they are being used in expendable, single use applications in the Russia/Ukraine war in spools of 50+km.
You're talking about achieving highly marginal gains in product quality at the expense of having to launch into space literally every single part of the production process and recover it from space.
Which includes things like "ruggedizing what you launch so it can survive the launch" and "also ruggedizing it to survive the landing".
> 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?
This feels like the “there’s a global market for maybe 4 computers” of the 21st century.
This feels like the “we should make an internet company that ships pet food to anyone, anywhere!” of the 21st century.
It makes zero dollars, but generates a lot of debt. It's worth negative dollars by any sane measure.
I really wish I could buy the SpaceX part of SpaceX decoupled from all the AI hopium.
You might enjoy Rocket Lab $RKLB, pure space tech without the AI distraction.
> In our model, we estimate SpaceX raising an average of $72bn annually between 2027 and 2030 and then an average of $95bn annually between 2031 and 2034
Ah. There it is. Even if that's all done as investment-grade debt (with a 50 bp underwriting spread), that's $3+ billion of banking fees.