• UnspecificGravity@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    Sure, but you are talking about being the leader in an industry that has historically been the profitless province of state sponsored exploration, scientific discovery, with supplementing industrial functions as a value-add. It is not a given what value there actually is in being the leader in this field.

    • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It’s almost like things are fundamentally different now from “historically.” Historically, we (I’m in the launch vehicle industry) didn’t have reusable launch vehicles. Even 10 years ago the launch community was hugely skeptical of being able to successfully refurbish a rocket and maintain mission assurance.

      My point is that most of the launches being performed now are not state sponsored or for scientific discovery. You are looking at it from the lens of a period when there were only two providers and only a few customers. With tons of commercial companies interested in proliferated LEO programs, there is a lot of profit in launch.

      However, that STILL only gives the stock a value of around $8/share.

        • dogslayeggs@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          NASA flies roughly 3 missions per year. DoD/DoW launches around 12 missions per year. NRO launches around 5 per year. That is a total of around 20 government missions per year. SpaceX launches roughly 150 missions per year, so removing state funding would only take out about 13% of their $18 billion annual revenue. 100 of those launches are Starlink, which gets funded by both commercial, private users, and government users.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            20 hours ago

            You can get infinite Revenue by giving everybody $2 if they give you $1 dollar.

            Such a company could proudly claim to have 1 billion sales and $1 billion dollars in revenue whilst not mentioning the “small detail” that they took $1 billion in losses to make those sales - which is pretty much what you’re doing there for SpaceX.

            When judging an investment, which is what we’re doing here when talking about their IPO, what maters is profit, not revenue.

          • UnspecificGravity@piefed.social
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            1 day ago

            That 18 billion in revenue already results in an operating loss of 4 billion a year. So its a little odd to hear you act like “only” losing another 13% is insignificant since it would increase their loss by about 30%.

            Also, that is assuming that all launches cost the same, which is probably not the case at all. The NASA launches are likely considerably more costly than Starlink launches.

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      That was because it was so costly to get even a single kg into orbit. The commercial satellite industry is a quarter of a trillion dollars and growing in part because the cost to get stuff in orbit is going down.