If Musk wanted to reassure investors, he should have promised not to sell any stock until the release of Full Self Driving.
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Wasn’t Twitter already continually losing money with no particular path to profitability long before this guy stepped in?
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Musk did away with “no clear path to profitability” and replaced it with “log flume drop to insolvency.”
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To your point about less expensive and likely higher-quality EVs, I have faith that we are 5-10 years away from a major breakthrough in battery technology. When that happens, EVs should actually cost less than gas or hybrids. Battery technology is maybe the leading concern for materials science engineers!
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They’d turned a profit a couple of non-consequtive quarters just before he bought them and they were breaking even more often than not.
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The version of Starlink used exclusively by the US government,1) the Falcon launches with DOD payloads and the nonmilitary stuff for NASA etc mean that SpaceX just doesn’t has a foot in the door. Combined with what the other US launch companies can offer (especially in the heavy lift department) right now and the fact that some payloads can’t and won’t go on any non-US launch provider, SpaceX is vital right now.
Which is why I think that also right now, there are people in the US government who are trying to come up with a way to have Musk kicked out of both SpaceX and Starlink, or at least put a metaphorical firewall between him and the sensitive stuff.
And that’s just the military-industrial-political side of things.
As pointed out above by several Happy Mutants, Spacelink is in no small way propping up SpaceX. Since they are both private, it is hard to find any reliable numbers. I did some back-of-the-envelope guestimates on Starlink a while ago; either in the Spaaaaace thread or in the other one.
By this, there is no way that Starlink makes enough money to cover the costs, let alone turning a profit, right now. Or anytime soon. But so far investors doesn’t seem to mind that much, because reasons middle-aged boy genius, and hey, just look at Tesla.
Right now (I’m using this a lot in this post, am I not?), Starlink is a niche application that makes sense for remote regions and so on, but that doesn’t generate enough money to build, maintain and expand the infrastructure.
Slowing down the expansion is not part of the game plan because what is part of the game plan is establishing facts. In other words, put as many satellites in orbit as fast as possible before there are effective regulations against it. Outrun the regulators.
Starlink is supposed to become attractive by evolving form “nice application” to “universal carrier”, getting ALL the business, including a huge slice of what is now surface based in one way or another.
There is an interesting technical angle to both of this.
In order to be able to launch a buttload of satellites on a single rocket, the satellites are small and the rocket doesn’t lift them up the whole way to their designated orbits. The satellites spend some time - and fuel! - to end up in their place. Because they are small they can’t carry that much fuel. Once they are actually working and earning money for Starlink there isn’t that much fuel left to maintain a working orbit, so they need to be replaced soon-ish. This makes sense if your first objective is to outrun regulation and stake your claim before the competition does it. Also, this can actually work if you time it right.
Long term, satellites need to be larger so they can carry more fuel to maintain their orbits for longer durations.
Satellites will also grow larger to accommodate the extra tech for extra capabilities, like direct mobile phone to satellite communications.
Both will also make them heavier.
Meaning less satellites per launch on the existing launchers. Meaning costs will go up, again.
And this is where, per the master plan, Starship comes in.
The one thing Starship actually could do better than any other heavy lifter, existing or on the drawing board right now, is lifting a heavy and bulky load into low Earth orbit. Exceptionally well, in fact. And that’s it.
It’s not fair to call Starship a one trick pony, but doing anything else than lifting heavy, bulky, uncrewed payloads into LEO gets insanely complicated really quick.
And this is where the timing for Starlink comes apart.
Right now, Starship is well behind both in time and in its projected capabilities.
So, scale down the payloads? Improve the lift? A combination of both?
Far from impossible, but this will take a lot more time than anticipated by the megamind behind of all this.
Right now, Starship has N1 syndrome with less impressive explosions; I wonder what Sergei Pavlovich would have to say.
For making Starlink work as intended it would have made a lot more sense to improve Falcon Heavy first, and I’m fairly certain that this was what the competent people at SpaceX had wanted to do, but it would appear that somebody was of the opinion that they could just skip this step.
SpaceX can thank their lucky stars high-powered lobbyists for being subsidized by government contracts - it’s still okay as long as you firmly believe in an entirely unregulated free economy, and if the money goes to the right people. But that goes without saying.
This is also why SpaceX put in a bid for HLS, if you ask me. The only way to keep some of their investors would be to show them that they can tap into the government’s coffers.
So, interesting times for spaceflight fanciers.
Edits: tyops, tyops, tyops everywhere.
ETA: Clarification.
When I say “Starship” I usually mean the actual Starship and the reusable booster that comes with it.
ETA2: Clarification.
1) Starshield. It was adapted from the Starlink communications network, but Starshield is a business unit of SpaceX for coming up with purpose-built LEO military hardware. Which makes SpaceX a defense contractor.
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Interesting. So it’s not just me who wonders what the hell was going on at NASA when they made Starship the key part of Artemis and the lunar lander?
Twelve or more launches just to get one lander to the Moon - and then that lander looks exactly like the first plans drawn up for Apollo which were criticised for its huge weight and the complexity of getting crews in and out of the lander.
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NASA desperately needs whatever goodwill they can generate with congress and would resort to human sacrifice1) if it would secure the next budget without too many critical reductions. Let alone result in a budget that is actually large enough and long term for a change.
More.
At least 15 with the depot and the tankers. Per NASA and the GAO report.2)
Based on the slightly optimistic 100t/launch lift capability, which Starship3) hasn’t got yet.
Also, this means more launches for one lunar mission than all Apollo launches combined.
The mission architecture has to be more complicated because the mission now is to land people on the Moon who stay considerable longer. Days, possibly weeks, instead of of hours.
But using Starship makes the architecture insanely complicated and relies heavily on stuff that doesn’t even exist yet.
1) I mean, they came pretty close a couple of times already, unintentionally.
2) Paul, the Pressure-Fed Astronaut has a couple of interesting videos4) on the problems with Starship. Some of the are a bit out of date and I wouldn’t agree with everything, but the fundamentals still stand. His style of delivery can be a bit weird (I like it), but he does have a degree in aerospace engineering and cites his sources, which puts him ahead of the field.
3) When I say “Starship” I usually mean the actual Starship and the reusable booster that comes with it.
ETA:
4) Specifically, No, Billionaires aren’t going to Mars, HLS (Gone Wrong), Criticizing Starship (Part Three) and the ones about IFT-1, IFT-2 and IFT-3. Criticizing Starship parts 1 and 2 are somewhat superseded by part 3, but still interesting. Also, Paul really got the measure of Musk; lots about the personality cult besides the technical stuff.
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Pretty much this. They had a steady, reliable source of income with a relatively small amount of drama with how they ran the business compared to their rivals Meta and Reddit. The investors got greedy and wanted ALL the money so they sold the scraps to Elon.
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Telsa isn’t a care company. It’s a social media company (now).
Musk will just have Tesla bail-out Twitter. Just like he’s string with xAI.
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This is so ridiculous. They have to show results or no budget for them while the fools in congress busying playing showmanship politics for internet points without being able to pass the annual budget bill to prevent government shut down as bare minimum.
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Isn’t that Shotwell? They’re going to need to do a lot more this time.
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Maybe. And apparently more regarding the technical side of things.
Whatever the competent people at SpaceX have been doing in this regard seems to have worked up to developing the Falcon9 and, to some extent, Falcon Heavy.
But skipping from the current Falcon Heavy to Starship without a couple of intermediate steps is just begging for problems. Huge, time consuming, expensive problems.
On the political side of things? Does Shotwell even get half the chance to weigh in and influence decisions? Is she taken along to meetings with members of congress and whatnot on a regular basis and then asked for her opinion as the manager of an aerospace company? I don’t know.
Shotwell is “responsible for day-to-day operations and company growth” (per Jimbopedia/Bloomberg), so my guess is that she is involved, but that Musk hogs all the limelight.
SpaceX’s internal workings are, well, internal. That’s private industry for you.1) My thoroughly uninformed guess is that Shotwell was able to let a “boss distraction team” fly under the radar during the development of Falcon9, but couldn’t stop or sideline Starship.
Shotwell is the COO, but Musk is THE BOSS. They can’t really keep him out of anything when he really wants in. At some point, kicking him out altogether to keep the DOD contracts might be the best option.
(For some reason, since 2019 Shotwell is also on the Board of Directors of Polaris; I don’t know what to make of this.)
1) That’s one of the things I like about NASA. They must wash their dirty laundry in public and most of what they produce ends up in the public domain. Which is also why we know more about Boeing’s calamity capsule than Boeing would prefer and why we will know more about Starship - the bits that are part of HLS - than SpaceX would prefer.
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Even though Musk says Tesla is now an AI company, it is in fact a stock promotion company, and has been for a long time. Sometimes I wonder if it ever was a car company since Musk took over.
This.
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Well, this too:
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Yes. Since 2017, going by the launches.
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If he did that, what would prevent President Biden from ordering the domain name seized (due to suspicion of election fraud or something similar), Musk’s US citizenship revoked, and Musk either arrested (on charges of election fraud) or deported to South Africa or Canada (depending on which one he would have citizenship in after getting kicked out of the US)?
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No idea what should prevent him. I don’t even see a reason why he doesn’t to that right now.
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… Musk may be endlessly reliving the last days of apartheid in his head
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