Europe and China are both working on reusable rockets. Blue Origin is doing the same.
Access to space is a national security thing so all big countries will fund their own alternatives.
Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
China and Blue Origin are Europe may be funding the research, but Arianespace ensures it's more than a decade away from matching today's Falcon Heavy.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years. Why buy from the US when you can buy from more reliable players
Because it's cheaper and more frequent.
The thing is that you can't put a price tag on national security. For example Ukraine got F16s. Good plane. However after a spat between Zelensky a Trump, Ukrainian F16 got no new updates to their jammers, which temporarily degraded the plane performance and Ukrainians needed to pull them out of frontlines.
Sometimes it is just better to fly on a plane which is not the top performer, but which you can control and manufacture or which a neighbor with same geopolitical problems like you can control and manufacture - i.e. Swedish SAAB JAS39
Same with space launches. Furthermore SpaceX is US company, so US government will want to know everything about the payload, probably down to the schematics and software, which is a big no-no for national security, but even for IP protection - what is stopping US government to supplying your IP to your US competitor? Nothing.
Of course you can. It costs more, but a finite amount more.
Your argument is it'sz worth paying that cost. I agree. But those cases are limited, both by the customer base and that additional cost.
SpaceX is not launching non-U.S. national security payloads. That's not great for American power. But it's a rounding error for a launch provider putting mass in orbit over three times a week [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
I wouldn’t make business or investment decisions based on any assumptions about “alienation.” I was just in Tokyo for a week of meetings with various business professionals, and there was zero sign of any “alienation.” I was expecting to spend most of the time talking about tariffs and nobody even about them. Everyone instead was focused on the new Prime Minister’s faux pas commenting on the security of Taiwan.
Just one set of data points, of course, but consider whether this concept of alienation is real or a creation of US media.
Blue Origin is losing billions every year, its not hobby of the richest person in the world, not true competitor. Remember rockets are small markets and everybody other then SpaceX is losing money.
Europe and China has literally 0 shot at breaking into the places SpaceX dominates. Europe will take another 10 years before they get a reusable rocket and even then, launching something like Starship wouldn't happen for another long time after that.
China simply can't compete in these markets by law, in the US. Them having reusable rockets doesn't matter for SpaceX. I don't think China will have Starlink competitor that can compete globally anytime soon. But that might be a real competitor eventually.
Kupiter is arguable a more real competitor.
> Assuming the US continues to alienate its allies, I assume spaceX will be limited to the domestic market in 5-10 years.
That's a gigantic, gigantic, huge and absurdly large assumption.
A lot would need to happen for all current US allies to block all SpaceX products.
Not to suggest that 61x multiple is justified, but your counter argument doesn't really work.
I think the better argument against the 61x multiple is that the overall market simply isn't big enough. SpaceX would have to break into many other markets and how to do that is difficult to say for a number of reasons.
The launching is routine, the landing and being able to turn around the same booster again in a few weeks is a capability no one else has. Their ability to launch so often came in handy over the past few years when other providers faltered. They were able to, on short notice, take over launches from Ariane 6, Vulcan, and Antares because of development delays and Soyuz because of political problems. No other medium launch provider can fit a launch in on short notice, they need years of lead time for one, let alone multiple. For SpaceX they just bump a Starlink payload a few months from now and replace it with the new one.
> all for their not as good as fiber internet
Starlink is making money. Its not just stealing market share from the incumbents but its significantly expanded the market.
I would hope so, the Shotwell 2018 TED Talk put point to point flights for Starship for around the price of business class in commercial service by 2028, Musk said still on track a few years later after the move away from aspirated cooling, a bit later I think they made the move to aspirational timelines.
After that I decided I wasn't going to count Musk's eggs before they are hatched. What has been accomplished with Starship so far is impressive, that should be acknowledged. But big todo items, heat shield, refueling and reusability are still to be proved and we'll have to wait and see if and when they are achieved.
Weird. I must have been imagining the Falcon 9 launching more mass to orbit this year than the entirety of the rest of the planet. More than all the flights of the Space Shuttle program combined.
737 MAX crashing and killing people due to slapped-together flight control integration.
737 MAX having windows blow out due to sheer manufacturing incompetence.
KC-46 deliveries being rejected due to literal tools being found in fuel tanks.
Boeing HAD an over 100 year history of delivering. You can build a thousand bridges. No one's calling you a bridgebuilder after you shag just one sheep.
It's preferable to 3G or being stranded in the woods, but there are definitely points where I wondered if a 4G LTE hotspot would have been faster for home internet.
From my understanding, physics would not allow that (for a decent, not oversubscribed 4G LTE mobile connection and backhaul). But those parameters exist for satellite internet, too.
One of them flew six flights successfully, got contract extended further to 14 flights for a total of 4.93 billion. They also flew other paying customers seven times.
In that time, the second one flew once with astronauts, and had so many problems that they ended up coming home on the first guy's spacecraft.
I will let you figure out who is who.
Consistent delivery at all levels indeed.
Like Starliner?
> SpaceX has .... good vibes?
...if by "good vibes" you mean:
- 138 rocket launches last year
- Global low-latency internet
You don't need either of these to justify the thesis. Just LEO constellations.
Monopoly may be fleeting. Advantage, no.
Again, we're looking at a decade plus of SpaceX having a decided advantage in putting mass in orbit. That could mean more capability, more capacity, faster deployment of new technology or even more margin (since you can go cheap on station keeping).
From about $9bn in 2023. 40%+ growth yields a PRG ratio (modified PEG [1]) of about 1.5x.
Boeing managed to increase its revenue in 2025 about 10%, putting its similar ratio at around 0.2x. SpaceX trading around 7x where Boeing trades doesn't strike me, at first glance, as unreasonable.
Its not clear to me how much room there is for that kind of growth to continue.
They are the overwhelmingly dominate space company, but how much actual revenue growth can you get from that. Telecommunications is already the largest part of the sector, and SpaceX already the overwhelmingly dominate player.
At some point you need to break into something other then that to be able to continue to grow.
Or maybe my assumption about that is wrong, and combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative.
Ten years ago, smart people said the launch market couldn't possibly grow beyond $3 to 5bn.
There is a tonnne of induced demand when it comes to launch. In LEO alone we have telecommunications, sensing and defence applications, most of which don't do well when put on the same bird. Add to that potential power-transmission uses and a global race to the Moon and Mars and it seems even if Starship can be mass manufactured, production will be the limiter, not demand.
> combined with Starship launch will be so cheap that it can compete against some broadand on the ground. But that seems speculative
Doubtful for broadband. Probable for rural and maybe even suburban cellular.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1iarntp/orbit...
Don't forget about IRIS2!
Amazon is not a competitor until they actually have a viable product which they may never achieve.
Like Tesla, SpaceX was ahead of the game by making big bets on new technology. Over time, that lead erodes when other players start competing. Tesla is now a declining player in EVs rapidly falling behind market leaders in AV and battery tech. I suspect spaceX will have a similar trajectory
Tesla integrated other peoples cells into a nice system, but they were never uniquely good at that. They were successful because they invested a huge amount into scaling battery manufacture faster then anybody in the beginning. Something that everybody could replicate.
SpaceX on the other hand has a true technical advantage. But its also a much smaller market.
Well, the US sphere of influence, at least.
Musk's aggravating enough of Europe that he may find that door is closing and locking.
"SpaceX is kicking off a secondary share sale." It isn't raising money, it's letting insiders sell. In the past, SpaceX has been a net buyer of its shares in such tenders.
Also the EU has setup a working Starlink competitor (by approving the feature on "old" satellites), and China is already doing launches and theirs should be at least partially operational. Russia claims to have a working Starlink competitor and India is building one.
Oh and as for profitability ... not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before, with the most spectacular crash being Iridium, but that was far from the only attempt+bankruptcy building Space internet. Well, the economics are discussed in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaUCDZ9d09Y
TLDR: SpaceX is bankrupt, Starlink is a pets.com "We lose on every sale but make it up on volume" style move. So yes, high time to sell the stock indeed.
Oh, and Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars and will be the first private company getting a payload to Mars soon (the "ESCAPADE" mission). As in payload is on the way and there's no way SpaceX can catch up anymore. In fact it's pretty tough finding another rocket manufacturer that has not launched a mission to Mars. Boeing has launched payloads to Mars. Blue origin has. Arianespace has. Russia has. Not especially economically relevant* but worth mentioning. Economics are not what determines either rocket building or launches and hasn't ever done so. Which means rocket launches are cheaper than they can be in private hands.
* what is economically relevant though is that SpaceX is not even saving the US government money. The US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program. Everyone always makes the point that SpaceX is cheaper than SLS. However ... this fails to correctly compare prices for the only options the US government has:
Option 1: pay for SLS
Option 2: pay for SLS and SpaceX.
So really the price of SpaceX rocket launches doesn't even matter, not using SpaceX will be the cheapest option because math.
As you said, not especially relevant to a financial discussion.
> as for profitability
SpaceX is profitable.
> US government cannot risk having SpaceX as a single option to get to orbit, so it has no choice developing a publicly funded rocket program
Being the U.S. government's prime contractor while it keeps ULA on life support is a great deal. Same for Europe and Arianespace.
What about that Tesla that regularly crosses Mars orbit? Ok, it's not on Mars, but it was just about calculating an orbit. They could have smashed it on Mars as well.
(Though tbf the choice of launch vehicle isn't that relevant to whether the ESCAPADE mission succeeds, and missions involving Mars flybys like Hera which are lot more serious than the Tesla one have been launched on SpaceX rockets)
That in turn enables Starlink. They can put up thousands of satellites very cheaply. Then they can turn around and sell subscriptions. Starlink has about 8 million active customers. At $40+/month, that's at least $4 billion/year in revenue. Probably a lot more. Given their launch costs, that's a ton of profit.
"not that Starlink hasn't been tried 10 times before" is just... not true. Nothing like it was ever tried before. Iridium is the only one that came even vaguely close, and it was still a radically different type of service. Iridium was extremely low capacity phone service, then low-bandwidth (it made dialup look super fast by comparison) data, with a network of a few dozen satellites covering the globe. It could not support many customers because it had few satellites. It also had to pay for launches in the 1990s, so an order of magnitude or more costlier. That means that it was enormously expensive, for a product few people actually needed. Handsets cost thousands of dollars, then you got to pay several dollars per minute on top of that.
Iridium was basically space dialup, and extremely expensive space dialup at that. Starlink is space broadband, and their cheap launch costs and other technological advancements mean the service is profitable at a competitive price point.
Option 1 isn't an option, really. NSSL policy is to ensure that there are two independent providers so that Assured Access To Space can work.
IMO the only remaining unanswered question for the Starship program is the reusability of the heat shield. There's no reason to believe any other part of it can't work.
I only casually follow the news from r/spacex, but prop transfer is what I see generate the most discussion. It’s a hard requirement for all deep space missions. Where the heat shield could be refurbished between launches.
Propellant transfer is relevant because it's vital for sending entire Starships to Moon and Mars - which are the exciting Starship missions. This includes Artemis. But commercially? Artemis contract isn't even a large part of SpaceX's revenue.
The heat shield is a huge problem though. Without the heat shield, there's simply no way SpaceX can use Starship to make money.
Is there a tldr someone put together here ?
Also, I wonder how receptive the world will be to Chinese ISPs given their history of internet censorship at home.
I think the world, well mainly govs, many of whom who are already running Huawei network gear would appreciate PRC willingness to accomodate local filtering (censorship) rules with how world is trending towards cyber soveignty.
That said, I can see SpaceX being elevated to Boeing tier strategic asset to compete, assuming Musk badblood doesn't interfere.
Meanwhile the Starship factory is looking like it will be quite productive once the design is locked down.
As much as I want to fly with Chinese rocket to encourage launcher competition and redundancy, export controls prevent me from doing that.
Boeing for comparison has a 2x multiple (65b rev with a 154b valuation).