SpaceX Is Now One of the World's Most Valuable Privately Held Companies (theverge.com) 107
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX is now valued at $21.2 billion, knocking off WeWork as the fourth most valuable privately held tech company in America. This skyrocket in valuation comes after another round of funding that raised $351 million for the company. According to Equidate, a marketplace for trading private tech company stocks, SpaceX's price per share is now $135, up from $96.42 prior to the new funding round. The latest valuation makes SpaceX one of the top five most valuable private, venture-backed tech companies in the US, joining Uber ($69.8B), Airbnb ($31B), WeWork ($20.8B), and the less consumer-facing analytics company Palantir ($21.3B). (SpaceX previously held the sixth spot before Snap, Inc. went public in March.) All five companies are disruptive forces in their respective industries, and also top the world's most valuable startups alongside Didi Chuxing and Xiaomi, as first pointed out by The New York Times. Last year, SpaceX was valued at $14.6 billion.
I like it (Score:3)
"This skyrocket in valuation..."
Nothing against bad puns, but you overdid it here.
Re:I like it (Score:5, Funny)
naah. that one gave a good solid boost to the summary and landed right on the mark.
Re:I like it (Score:4, Funny)
He may have lifted too much from the articles, but it did set the stage for his delivery.
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"This skyrocket in valuation..."
Nothing against bad puns, but you overdid it here.
He should have re-used an older pun :)
Re: I like it (Score:1)
You mean the one that crashed and burned?
Re:I like it (Score:5, Funny)
He's not very good at punning. He tried making ten different puns yesterday, hoping at least one of them would elicit a laugh, but no pun in ten did.
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valuations are dime a dozen.
it can be argued that xiaomi is more valuable due to them having more steady products line.
anyways, if you were wondering what defines a startup, it's the simple "has not paid off the investors".
Watch when their resuable rocket thing pans out (Score:5, Insightful)
Watch what happens when their reusable rocket thing actually finally pans out. They're still somewhat in the experimentation/development phase of that. But once they can relyably reuse their rockets on a regular basis, price to orbit will drop by orders of magnitude and change humanities entire perspective on space travel, Neuromancer style. SpaceX could easily become the most valuable company ever on an entirely new scale.
Considering how things are going and how Elon Musk and the people he get's on board have a reputation for getting the job done this evaluation is entirely justified IMHO.
Re:Watch when their resuable rocket thing pans out (Score:5, Informative)
The real value is what they plan to start launching once they get their cadence up. They're looking to launch a constellation of around 4000 LEO satellites to provide cheap, global, low-latency, high-bandwidth internet. I've seen some analyses of their plan, and done some of my own, and their numbers on all aspects are in general "tough, but it should be doable". The goal is to take over 50% of the backhaul traffic on the internet, while rapidly growing it by providing high speed access to previously isolated parts of the globe. The amount of money being talked about if they succeed is mind-boggling.
They're not the only one with this goal. Samsung announced a similar proposal, and Blue Origin is also striving for it. Everybody sees the dollar signs; the question is who will actually achieve it first?
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They're not the only one with this goal. Samsung announced a similar proposal, and Blue Origin is also striving for it. Everybody sees the dollar signs; the question is who will actually achieve it first?
Even a former Googler was interested in the idea, and thought of doing it independently. I think that person ultimately decided to invest in SpaceX instead, since the independent proposal seems to have vanished.
I'd bet on SpaceX, myself. They have people who have flown orbital hardware, repeatedly. Blue Origin and Samsung may, but neither have done so in their current organizations. The skill of individuals is important, but the role of a successful organization is far more important. No skilled indivi
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SpaceX could easily become the most valuable company ever on an entirely new scale.
Why, are a few billion people lining up to send stuff into orbit? A billion people probably do order stuff between amazon.com, alibaba, and Walmart everyday.
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Why, are a few billion people lining up to send stuff into orbit? A billion people probably do order stuff between amazon.com, alibaba, and Walmart everyday.
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"I send a post-carriage from Berlin to Potsdam every day and they're not even booked out. I don't understand why people would want to invest into this crazy harebrained extremely expensive train thing." (paraphrased) - German Reichspostminister roughly 2 centuries ago on this new "steam engine train fad" that was popping up everywhe
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The rest of space is not
No, but neither do you find anywhere on Earth a 200 km sized rock of metallic nickel and iron, no smelting needed.
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Re:Watch when their resuable rocket thing pans out (Score:5, Insightful)
But once they can relyably reuse their rockets on a regular basis, price to orbit will drop by orders of magnitude and change humanities entire perspective on space travel, Neuromancer style. SpaceX could easily become the most valuable company ever on an entirely new scale.
Orders of magnitude? No. Musk said fuel is currently about 3% of total launch cost. One order of magnitude would make that 30%, two orders would be 300%. Unless you can work magic in fuel efficiency and do the rest for free, not happening. Even with Musk's most generous long time full reuse scenario (where a booster has 1000 launches, tanker 100 and the spaceship 12 and the refurb costs are minimal like <0.1% on the booster and <1% on the tanker) he's estimating $140/kg to Mars surface. Until you got a working fuel production plant on Mars so the spaceship can return - a highly theoretical idea at the moment - then $520/kg. And I'm pretty sure that doesn't include development costs, this is purely marginal costs but let's ignore those.
So for a person ~$50k minimum ticket price, of course that doesn't include air, water, food, heating, shielding or anything else you'd need on a months-long trip through space. Or anything you'd need to survive on Mars a couple years, if not you personally then all the people working there maintaining the base and supporting you. I'm thinking $200k at least. So after being stuck in a tin can for months you're stuck in a slightly bigger dome for 2.5 years and even though you can go outside it's not exactly like home. Then some more months in a tin can before you land back on earth and discover your muscles haven't tried 1G for almost three years. And unlike a submarine that can actually abort and surface if they have to, that's not an option here.
I think the novelty of it will wear off real quick and after three years you'll feel more like a supermax prisoner that's finally out of jail than anyone who has had the experience of a lifetime. That is unless there's any system failure of any kind along the way where you'll most likely end up dead. Don't get me wrong, the first to go will be super-celebrities and all that so that will be cool. But when you're like the 834th person on Mars, eh... and it's not like you're climbing Mount Everest or something, you're probably doing routine maintenance most the time. I should probably also remind you that nobody has come up with any commercially viable business on Mars - at best it's reducing the costs so Earth won't have to pay as much to support a Mars outpost. It still takes political will to fund it, cost-plus or fixed price.
Or maybe I should put this in a TL;DR form: Even if Musk achieves everything he wants to do, most space sci-fi will remain fiction.
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So after being stuck in a tin can for months you're stuck in a slightly bigger dome for 2.5 years and even though you can go outside it's not exactly like home.
Well, if it was exactly like home, why would you go there?
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Well, if it was exactly like home, why would you go there?
Well, good point. But you're in an airtight suit so you can't really feel it and you can't go hiking very far, surviving even a single night outside would be very complicated in terms of oxygen and temperature. Mars is barren, there's no vegetation or animals so apart from the sunlight there are no seasons just dust and rocks that look just the same day in and day out. There's no precipitation of any kind, no running water. There's not even any wind, at least not any stronger than that it barely wipes dust
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Why would one want to leave earth? My personal guesses:
1. political reasons (want to try new whatever-ism and found your own country)
2. religious reasons (escape prosecution / harassment)
3. tax reasons (in case all existing tax havens get busted)
4. earth too crowded
5. FOMO (for countries, ex: China)
Just remember why people went to the new world.
Once you have a critical mass in space there will be demand of stuff which will drive space mining and from there it's going to grow.
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Orders of magnitude? No. Musk said fuel is currently about 3% of total launch cost. One order of magnitude would make that 30%, two orders would be 300%.
Replacement of RP-1 with methane could easily make those 300% into almost 100%. By the way, I think he said 0.3% anyway, not 3%, so you still have one more OoM to work with.
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But once they can relyably reuse their rockets on a regular basis, price to orbit will drop by orders of magnitude and change humanities entire perspective on space travel, Neuromancer style. SpaceX could easily become the most valuable company ever on an entirely new scale.
Orders of magnitude? No. Musk said fuel is currently about 3% of total launch cost. One order of magnitude would make that 30%, two orders would be 300%. Unless you can work magic in fuel efficiency and do the rest for free, not happening. Even with Musk's most generous long time full reuse scenario (where a booster has 1000 launches, tanker 100 and the spaceship 12 and the refurb costs are minimal like <0.1% on the booster and <1% on the tanker) he's estimating $140/kg to Mars surface. Until you got a working fuel production plant on Mars so the spaceship can return - a highly theoretical idea at the moment - then $520/kg. And I'm pretty sure that doesn't include development costs, this is purely marginal costs but let's ignore those.
So for a person ~$50k minimum ticket price, of course that doesn't include air, water, food, heating, shielding or anything else you'd need on a months-long trip through space. Or anything you'd need to survive on Mars a couple years, if not you personally then all the people working there maintaining the base and supporting you. I'm thinking $200k at least. So after being stuck in a tin can for months you're stuck in a slightly bigger dome for 2.5 years and even though you can go outside it's not exactly like home. Then some more months in a tin can before you land back on earth and discover your muscles haven't tried 1G for almost three years. And unlike a submarine that can actually abort and surface if they have to, that's not an option here.
I think the novelty of it will wear off real quick and after three years you'll feel more like a supermax prisoner that's finally out of jail than anyone who has had the experience of a lifetime. That is unless there's any system failure of any kind along the way where you'll most likely end up dead. Don't get me wrong, the first to go will be super-celebrities and all that so that will be cool. But when you're like the 834th person on Mars, eh... and it's not like you're climbing Mount Everest or something, you're probably doing routine maintenance most the time. I should probably also remind you that nobody has come up with any commercially viable business on Mars - at best it's reducing the costs so Earth won't have to pay as much to support a Mars outpost. It still takes political will to fund it, cost-plus or fixed price.
Or maybe I should put this in a TL;DR form: Even if Musk achieves everything he wants to do, most space sci-fi will remain fiction.
While I like you point, one thing to take into consideration is that not much have been done to reduce the cost of rocket fuel since, well, it's insignifiant.
When reusable launch system will become the norm and fuel will be the biggest cost of all launch, a lot more money will be put in R&D de develop cheaper fuel.
Of course, this is if we don't see a new technology overtaking it by then (Space Elevator or other cheap Non-rocket spacelaunch system).
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Watch what happens when their reusable rocket thing actually finally pans out.
That may not happen until either someone builds a catapult big enough to launch payloads, or until the Earth has its own ring made of satellites and launch debris.
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Watch what happens when their reusable rocket thing actually finally pans out. They're still somewhat in the experimentation/development phase of that. But once they can relyably reuse their rockets on a regular basis, price to orbit will drop by orders of magnitude and change humanities entire perspective on space travel, Neuromancer style. SpaceX could easily become the most valuable company ever on an entirely new scale.
Considering how things are going and how Elon Musk and the people he get's on board have a reputation for getting the job done this evaluation is entirely justified IMHO.
Well, from my understanding of the market (pretty slim), SpaceX, (like Tesla), is a big bubble of market speculation and, again from my understanding, the challenge is to change speculation into real value.
So, I think that SpaceX have a "speculative" value similar to what if should become in the most optimist schenario. Of course, at that time, SpaceX will still have some "speculative" value but I don't think it's gonna be as big as it is right now. Well, unless they present something as revolutionary to t
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These low interests rates and cheap money. (Score:3, Insightful)
These obscene valuations couldn't normally have happened in the past, but with today's low interest rates and cheap money we get these prices.
And do investors really understand ROI? SpaceX would have to become incredibly/'impossibly profitable to justify these valuations to get a decent return even at these current interest rates. Even the launch business increases increases tremendously, I still don't see how investors will get an adequate return. I have been wrong - once.
This cult of personality around Musk is getting very weird.
Mostly because of his publicists. That's why he has his publicists constantly putting some sort of story in the news and things he says: to keep his name on people's tongues. And when it comes time to get money, out comes the checkbooks. That's human nature. We're monkeys and the alpha monkey gets the spoils.
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"This cult of personality around Musk is getting very weird."
That's because we are used to Rich People being greedy and self-centred.
When someone does a Musk and provides any sort of benefit for the others, especially future others, it's seen as weird.
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And do investors really understand ROI? SpaceX would have to become incredibly/'impossibly profitable to justify these valuations to get a decent return even at these current interest rates. Even the launch business increases increases tremendously, I still don't see how investors will get an adequate return. I have been wrong - once.
You know, I think I could come up with dumber valuations of companies. Like several of those "social media" startups recently.
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BUT, SpaceX is a WHOLE other issue. Other than employees, the ONLY ones that can buy the stock are a number of billionaires and a few millionaire friends of Musk. And they continue to buy that stock.
Do you think that they are part of a cult? I do not. I think that they are SMART businessmen who KNOW where SpaceX is going and what it will be worth down the road. The fact that YOU DO NOT would indicate that you are not billiona
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And do investors really understand ROI? SpaceX would have to become incredibly/'impossibly profitable to justify these valuations to get a decent return even at these current interest rates.
I'm quite sure SpaceX investors don't give a damn about ROI. The handful of billionaires and multi-millionaires who have invested in SpaceX are doing it to see something done, regardless of whether or not they get their money back afterwards. They were fantastically rich before they invested. They're still fantastically rich after they invested. This is play money to such people.
This is an echo of the New Space movement, except with money. Lots of it. For SpaceX specifically, this is about ideology, n
Valuations of private companies are challenging (Score:4, Informative)
Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX is now valued at $21.2 billion, knocking off WeWork as the fourth most valuable privately held tech company in America.
That is a nearly meaningless sentence. There is no good way to meaningfully value private companies unless they sell a piece of themselves and even then you really are only getting one party's opinion of what they are worth unlike in a proper secondary market. So hypothetically if I were to buy 5% of SpaceX for $1 billion, I am implicitly saying that I value SpaceX at $20 billion. That is basically what happened here. But that doesn't really mean it is actually worth that in the wider market because of the problem of the winner's curse [wikipedia.org]. Someone ponied up a lot of money in a funding round but one has to be careful to not extrapolate that one opinion too far.
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Presumably the people responsible for the $351 million in funding got a good look at the value before committing the money.
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Presumably humans make rational economic decisions.
Not necessarily, but on the whole, I would expect a few private investors with a lot of money to do better than the general public on the open stock market.
Private equity investors aren't special (Score:2)
Not necessarily, but on the whole, I would expect a few private investors with a lot of money to do better than the general public on the open stock market.
Why would you assume that? They're not smarter than the general public and they don't have some special crystal ball that lets them make better than average decisions. Sometimes they have some inside information but they aren't special. In actuality private equity investors invest on a portfolio basis no different from you or me. As a rule of thumb they expect about 1 out of 10 investments it actually pay off significantly. Most of their investments are breakeven at best. They have no way of knowing i
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In actuality private equity investors invest on a portfolio basis no different from you or me
So, they invest a few million in Apple, just because they like the latest iPad ?
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Actually, if you're investing $350mm, you generally DO get a good way of knowing about the company you're investing in. That is - they pretty much tell you whatever you ask. You get to look at their plans, their tech, their infra, their people, etc.
If you really thing investors throw around that much money on a hunch without some realistic expectations you're naive.
Also, if most of your investments break even and 1 in 10 is a huge hit then you are WAY ahead of the game.
Yes big investors can be irresponsible (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if you're investing $350mm, you generally DO get a good way of knowing about the company you're investing in. That is - they pretty much tell you whatever you ask. You get to look at their plans, their tech, their infra, their people, etc.
I've been involved in several private equity investment deals first hand and that is demonstrably not true in many cases. I've been on both the buyer's side of the table and the seller. It depends on how the power relationships between the investor and the company sits. Sometimes the company doesn't give them nearly as much information as you would think would be appropriate. Sometimes the investor simply doesn't ask the right questions. Sometimes the investor doesn't ask enough questions. Sometimes fraud is involved. See Theranos if you need an example of most of the above. While most big dollar investors tend to do significant amounts of research they do not always do enough nor do they always do it well. This is no big secret.
If you really thing investors throw around that much money on a hunch without some realistic expectations you're naive.
I'm afraid you are the naive one here. I not only think that investors often throw around that kind of cash without appropriate due diligence, I know it for a fact and have seen innumerable cases of it. Private equity funds get money from investors and then they have to go out and find investments for that money with no guarantee that such investments are available for reasonable prices. A lot of the froth in the dotcom era was too many dollars chasing too few good opportunities. Companies got funded that had no business being funded and prices for good companies got bid up so high that a positive return on the investment was very difficult. At any given time there are a finite number of reasonably priced investments to be made and much like any other market sometimes the bidding become irrationally exuberant. Just because people have a lot of money to invest doesn't mean they are necessarily competent at doing so.
Look at it this way. 80-90% of mutual funds under perform the market average in any given year and almost none can do it for multiple years in a row. These are managed by experienced investment professionals with access to all the available information about the companies they invest in. And yet you think these people have some special advantage or insight? Big investors make stupid investments all the time. They just have to hope that some of their investments work out well enough to make up for the bad ones.
Also, if most of your investments break even and 1 in 10 is a huge hit then you are WAY ahead of the game.
I said "break even AT BEST". The at best bit is important. Many of them will lose money, sometimes a lot. Typically private equity funds will see 6-8 of their investments underwater to breakeven. 1-2 will be mild successes and if things go well, 1-2 at best will be big successes.
Due diligence (Score:2)
Presumably the people responsible for the $351 million in funding got a good look at the value before committing the money.
Possibly but sometimes they often don't get as good a look as you might imagine. That's not a huge investment by private equity standards and it's not hard to find cases where investors did not do their due diligence. The dotcom boom around 2000 was a great example of that. I have a lot of friends who are in the private equity world and while they are smart people they are hardly dispassionate and consistently rational. They make investing mistakes same as anyone else.
Re: Valuations of private companies are challengin (Score:1)
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Only heard of WeWork a few months ago, but it is a reasonably interesting business that I wanted to get into 4-5 years ago. However, I find it pretty hard to understand them being worth 4x JLL.
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It is a great system, and works great for distributed work forces... but it is an extra layer of management and requires a certain critical mass to work. WeWork has established the critical mass in many "hip" areas, but lacks much presence in the fringe zones (bedroom communities) that provides the opportunity to really scale up.
JLL in contrast has access to buildings essentially in every major country at different levels and could easily roll out a coworking "studio" in appropriate buildings.
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You just said a whole lot of nothing.
Fundamentally, and absent interference like government regulations and such, what something is worth is always going to boil down to how much people are willing to pay for it and what the supplier is willing to sell it for. This has been understood for centuries.
That said, you'd be stupid to not grab a piece of SpaceX while you can. Their reusable rocket technology, once stable, will mean a paradigm shift in space travel, something akin to the invention of the transistor
Crazy people versus valuations (Score:2)
Fundamentally, and absent interference like government regulations and such, what something is worth is always going to boil down to how much people are willing to pay for it and what the supplier is willing to sell it for. This has been understood for centuries.
The value of something in an open market is not the same thing as the value to one crazy investor. Just because someone is willing to pay an unreasonable price for something does not mean that is the market value of that item to any other buyer. So saying SpaceX is the "4th most valuable private company" doesn't really mean much because there is no objective way to corroborate that the price paid was rational.
$21.2B actually seems insulting for something that is infinitely more useful, and long lasting, say, Twitter or Facebook which have also have valuations in the billion range.
Thank you for making my point. Neither you nor I have any realistic way of evaluating if this on
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The value of something in an open market is not the same thing as the value to one crazy investor. Just because someone is willing to pay an unreasonable price for something does not mean that is the market value of that item to any other buyer
We have plenty of examples of the open market being very unreasonable too, even for extended periods of times.
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That is a nearly meaningless sentence. There is no good way to meaningfully value private companies unless they sell a piece of themselves and even then you really are only getting one party's opinion of what they are worth unlike in a proper secondary market. So hypothetically if I were to buy 5% of SpaceX for $1 billion, I am implicitly saying that I value SpaceX at $20 billion. That is basically what happened here. But that doesn't really mean it is actually worth that in the wider market because of the problem of the winner's curse [wikipedia.org]. Someone ponied up a lot of money in a funding round but one has to be careful to not extrapolate that one opinion too far.
As accurate as your statement is, it will never stop people from making valuations of private companies using *exactly* that logic.
Re: Valuations of private companies are challengin (Score:1)
Very good point. One benefit of pubically traded companies is larger transaction volumes leading to more accurate pricing ( although here effects still apply).
A related area is house prices in UK. Trading volumes are historically low so assumptions on price being made on small number of transactions.
What kind of fuel? (Score:1)
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If he is using oxygen and hydrogen to fuel the rockets, aren't we loosing it to outer space?
Actually, no. The rocket goes up. The rocket's exhaust goes down.
Newton's third law.
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Earth loses 9x10^4 kg of atmosphere daily. It escapes Earth's gravity due to a combination of heating and the solar wind. Don't worry too much, we have around 5x10^19 kg of it, and there are processes that replenish it somewhat. In fact, we're expecting Earth will have enough atmosphere to keep life happy right up to the point where the Sun cooks the planet and makes the atmosphere more or less pointless anyway.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 uses about 4.9x10^4 kg of fuel, which sounds like every launch adds about
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And may the Internet have mercy on my soul if I've messed those numbers up... but even if I have, the underlying argument is sound. We are not pumping valuable atoms into space in any significant quantities.
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I would think water vapor is less harmful than organic compounds produces by burning other kind of fuels.
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I've got it! We'll use carbon dioxide for fuel, and toss that into space.
[And if anyone can burn CO2, Musk can.]
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Currently... SpaceX looks like the gateway (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want 'affordable' access to the Solar system, it looks like you're going to be going through SpaceX to get it.
That's not really worth much right now, because they haven't actually delivered it yet. You might think the expense of a rocket isn't a big deal because satellites and other things we want to get into space are expensive enough to justify the rocket's cost... but have you considered that the reason we're shipping expensive things out of our gravity well is because the rockets' costs mean less expensive items can't be justified?
If space access is inexpensive enough, we'll find more to do. Asteroid retrieval will get a massive kick in the ass (which will have massively disruptive effects on Earth but be really good for us in the long run). Space stations will be less expensive, enabling more research into keeping humans healthy off Earth. Lunar and Mars missions will be less expensive, giving us more capability to prep for humans to permanently occupy those bodies and see if we can make self-sufficient operations there.
There's a lot of really, really hard work to do to get there, but most of it is pointless if we can't even affordably reach Earth orbit. SpaceX is our current hope for getting us to the point that all that other work becomes meaningful.
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If you want 'affordable' access to the Solar system, it looks like you're going to be going through SpaceX to get it.
That's not really worth much right now, because they haven't actually delivered it yet. You might think the expense of a rocket isn't a big deal because satellites and other things we want to get into space are expensive enough to justify the rocket's cost... but have you considered that the reason we're shipping expensive things out of our gravity well is because the rockets' costs mean less expensive items can't be justified?
If space access is inexpensive enough, we'll find more to do. Asteroid retrieval will get a massive kick in the ass (which will have massively disruptive effects on Earth but be really good for us in the long run). Space stations will be less expensive, enabling more research into keeping humans healthy off Earth. Lunar and Mars missions will be less expensive, giving us more capability to prep for humans to permanently occupy those bodies and see if we can make self-sufficient operations there.
There's a lot of really, really hard work to do to get there, but most of it is pointless if we can't even affordably reach Earth orbit. SpaceX is our current hope for getting us to the point that all that other work becomes meaningful.
Amazing what happens when time, money, and effort is spent on actual improvements instead of simply extracting and hoarding as much money as possible.
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Amazing what happens when time, money, and effort is spent on actual improvements instead of simply extracting and hoarding as much money as possible.
An interesting question is why it took a private, for-profit company to do it, given the tremendous amounts of money that we've poured into NASA. Granted that much of what got SpaceX off the ground was NASA funding, but it was relatively small amounts compared to NASA's budget. It seems that a profit motive is useful, though perhaps not necessary, or sufficient.
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SpaceX wasn't really created with a profit motive. The long term goal came first, and making it profitable was a strategy to achieve the goal. If it were simply about profit, it'd go public and cash in.
As for why NASA couldn't do it, that's because NASA doesn't have control to set its own goals and strategies and is milked for local benefit by congress people who don't care what NASA wants to do.
Sigh. (Score:2)
Any idiot with money to burn can throw billions at something.
Problem is that they aren't really profitable:
https://www.fool.com/investing... [fool.com]
And they now owe investors a ton of money/results. Though that may have worked for places like Amazon (whose initial investors were incredibly irate about such things), and though it might even make Musk richer (same as Jeff Bezos), it doesn't mean that it will translate into anything people can continue to use in the future when that investment doesn't pay off or prov
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The article was written at the beginning of 2017. We are now halfway in 2017, and the launches and landings are exceeding expectations.
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And at least one has blown up just shortly before then, resulting in total loss, pad cleanup, movement to a new spaceport, and resulting insurance increases in the interim.
It was founded 15 years ago, it's a bit premature to say "Yeah, but in the last six months things have been great" when only 6 months ago, it was still making basically zero profit.
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How so? Besides their commercial customers NASA hires SpaceX for various launch services (ISS cargo, ISS crew transport is coming, etc). The only "money war" that I can see is between SpaceX and the defense contractors (Lockheed, Boeing, Orbital ATK).
Right now it looks like it will be between SpaceX and the ULA/Blue Origin rockets. Defense have their own rockets and such but have already switched over and done at least one launch with SpaceX. ULA is trying to cate up with Blue Origin's, as yet unfinished, BE-4 engine to do the same first stage landing and re-use. If SpaceX fails, and the only way I can see that they will is if re-use doesn't cut the cost of launches as much as SpaceX thinks, they'll probably still continue on this route. If SpaceX Succe
The real value is... (Score:1)
Unaccountable Apollo-era space travel. (Score:1)
Unlike the established entities, they have less accountability and more opacity in terms of space travel - while stepping back to the Apollo era for their spacecraft.
When they finally catch up and make a proper Shuttle, they might have something.
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Is the Shuttle proper? It seemed to be limited to orbital missions, the original Shuttle programmed assumed that space stations were going to be a bigger deal than they are today. Perhaps a second time around we could avoid those mistakes by taking into account the various criticisms of the shuttle program [wikipedia.org].
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Then build a better Shuttle, not another Apollo-era capsule with less ability to fly.
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