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> Starship at $170B is pure option value on technology still in advanced testing. The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology tha

by genidoi 6mo ago

> Starship at $170B is pure option value on technology still in advanced testing. The argument that Starship is somehow an experimental/unproven technology that might fail to materialise was absurd but plausible sounding before flight 1, there were many new technologies simultaneously being deployed to a single launch system in one go. But after 3 tower catches of the booster demonstrating centimetres of guided precision of the entire stack, this is becoming a tired argument. I know the author is not making that case at all here, but it seems like one the core reasons to undervalue SpaceX is that Starship might not work out, and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago.

soperj 6mo ago
> and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out at all for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago I think a lot of it depends on whether they can make the reuse of the second stage work without having to redo stuff constantly like the shuttle. Reusing the booster will obviously save tons of money and make launches cheaper, but they're competing with themselves here. How big is the launch market with cheaper launches? We don't actually know.
ddp26 6mo ago
Yeah, I might have stated this poorly. In the forecast it's just a question of expected value, I don't give almost any probability to "Starship is worthless". My 50% CI on Starship's fair market value at IPO time is $123b - $227b, with a 80% CI even wider, not based on my own modeling, but based on anchoring to analysts that give credible arguments.
croes 6mo ago
Compared to Falcon 9 Starship has still more quality issues than the Falcon 9 at the same test stage
enslavedrobot 6mo ago
The viability of direct to cell connectivity at scale is unproven. This is actually the core value of SpaceX in the next 3-5 years. The other core value generation product will be financial transactions. It is unproven whether X money will be adopted for friction free transactions across national boundaries and whether the company can compete in the financial services sector.
maxerickson 6mo ago
How are they doing with their mass to orbit projections?
Izikiel43 6mo ago
They caught it 3 times already!? I missed 2 and 3 it seems.
kibwen 6mo ago
The question is not even whether or not Starship works. Starship is, in theory, designed with the idea of getting many, many payloads to Mars. However, getting payloads to Mars is not currently something that anyone is paying for; even NASA isn't going to focus on Mars for at least another decade (likely more). And in the meantime, it's not like we don't have rockets capable of getting payloads to Mars (the Saturn V was fully capable of doing so in the 60s). Likewise in the meantime, the Artemis plans that look to require a dozen+ launches for a single moonshot aren't painting Starship in a favorable light. So what is the near-to-medium-term economic prospect of Starship? That's the question. You can't just say "bigger rocket make more money", because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice. To use an analogy, we have jumbo jets, but most flights are not on jumbo jets.
- fastball 6mo ago
  > because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice This is only true because we are so completely beholden to the tyranny of the rocket equation with the current status quo. With the $/kg (and payload volume) that Starship would unlock, the entire ELO/GEO/Interplanetary/Deep Space market looks very different. Labs in space. Hotels in space. Weapons in space. Much more interesting satellites in space. More government science missions. Privately funded science/research missions. etc
  - multiplegeorges 6mo ago
    How many space telescopes better than anything we currently have can we put up when launch costs are <$50m? A huge synthetic telescope in orbit with an aperture the size of the planet? How many private earth observation satellites? The market is huge when weight constraints largely go away and $/kg drops so hard.
    - kibwen 6mo ago
      The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9. Once again, just because you have a jumbo jet that can fly 500 people from New York to London does not mean that everyone flying out of New York wants to go to London, and it doesn't mean that it's worth flying that jumbo jet from New York to Pierre, South Dakota with only one passenger on board.
AlexandrB 6mo ago
The tower catches are great, but the payload rating has been reduced several times now[1] and with it the economic argument for how Starship will make launching much cheaper than today as well as suitability for lunar/Mars launches. For Starship to be revolutionary enough for this kind of valuation it has to not just work, but outperform current solutions. SpaceX has basically admitted as much by promising Starship 2 & 3 with larger payloads (that Starship 1 was already supposed to deliver). [1] https://www.americaspace.com/2024/04/20/starship-faces-performance-shortfall-for-lunar-missions/ https://www.americaspace.com/2024/04/20/starship-faces-perfo...
- fastball 6mo ago
  That article is two years old. In traditional space launch terms that is a very short amount of time, but in SpaceX terms that's quite a while. They've already progressed to Starship 2 since then and are going to launch Starship 3 imminently (slated this month), which has Raptor v3 engines onboard and come with the efficiency gains you are talking about.
venusenvy47 6mo ago
The booster is definitely looking good, just like the Falcon 9 booster is very reliable. The big question for me is the upper stage, and whether they will be able to reuse anywhere near as often as they claim. It is so much more complex than the Falcon upper stages, which aren't reusable very quickly. It seems they have a lot to learn about upper stage reusability.
rkagerer 6mo ago
I didn't realize there had been 3 tower catches? Can anyone link to good video footage of the last two?

by genidoi 6mo ago

soperj 6mo ago

> and this all sounds exactly like how reusability might not work out at all for the Falcon 9 from 10 years ago I think a lot of it depends on whether they can make the reuse of the second stage work without having to redo stuff constantly like the shuttle. Reusing the booster will obviously save tons of money and make launches cheaper, but they're competing with themselves here. How big is the launch market with cheaper launches? We don't actually know.

ddp26 6mo ago

Yeah, I might have stated this poorly. In the forecast it's just a question of expected value, I don't give almost any probability to "Starship is worthless". My 50% CI on Starship's fair market value at IPO time is $123b - $227b, with a 80% CI even wider, not based on my own modeling, but based on anchoring to analysts that give credible arguments.

croes 6mo ago

Compared to Falcon 9 Starship has still more quality issues than the Falcon 9 at the same test stage

enslavedrobot 6mo ago

The viability of direct to cell connectivity at scale is unproven. This is actually the core value of SpaceX in the next 3-5 years. The other core value generation product will be financial transactions. It is unproven whether X money will be adopted for friction free transactions across national boundaries and whether the company can compete in the financial services sector.

maxerickson 6mo ago

How are they doing with their mass to orbit projections?

Izikiel43 6mo ago

They caught it 3 times already!? I missed 2 and 3 it seems.

kibwen 6mo ago

The question is not even whether or not Starship works. Starship is, in theory, designed with the idea of getting many, many payloads to Mars. However, getting payloads to Mars is not currently something that anyone is paying for; even NASA isn't going to focus on Mars for at least another decade (likely more). And in the meantime, it's not like we don't have rockets capable of getting payloads to Mars (the Saturn V was fully capable of doing so in the 60s). Likewise in the meantime, the Artemis plans that look to require a dozen+ launches for a single moonshot aren't painting Starship in a favorable light. So what is the near-to-medium-term economic prospect of Starship? That's the question. You can't just say "bigger rocket make more money", because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice. To use an analogy, we have jumbo jets, but most flights are not on jumbo jets.

fastball 6mo ago
> because there exists a useful upper to the size of payloads that companies actually want to ship to LEO in practice This is only true because we are so completely beholden to the tyranny of the rocket equation with the current status quo. With the $/kg (and payload volume) that Starship would unlock, the entire ELO/GEO/Interplanetary/Deep Space market looks very different. Labs in space. Hotels in space. Weapons in space. Much more interesting satellites in space. More government science missions. Privately funded science/research missions. etc
- multiplegeorges 6mo ago
  How many space telescopes better than anything we currently have can we put up when launch costs are <$50m? A huge synthetic telescope in orbit with an aperture the size of the planet? How many private earth observation satellites? The market is huge when weight constraints largely go away and $/kg drops so hard.
  - kibwen 6mo ago
    The question is whether those markets are not already adequately served by Falcon 9. Once again, just because you have a jumbo jet that can fly 500 people from New York to London does not mean that everyone flying out of New York wants to go to London, and it doesn't mean that it's worth flying that jumbo jet from New York to Pierre, South Dakota with only one passenger on board.

AlexandrB 6mo ago

The tower catches are great, but the payload rating has been reduced several times now[1] and with it the economic argument for how Starship will make launching much cheaper than today as well as suitability for lunar/Mars launches. For Starship to be revolutionary enough for this kind of valuation it has to not just work, but outperform current solutions. SpaceX has basically admitted as much by promising Starship 2 & 3 with larger payloads (that Starship 1 was already supposed to deliver). [1] https://www.americaspace.com/2024/04/20/starship-faces-performance-shortfall-for-lunar-missions/ https://www.americaspace.com/2024/04/20/starship-faces-perfo...

fastball 6mo ago
That article is two years old. In traditional space launch terms that is a very short amount of time, but in SpaceX terms that's quite a while. They've already progressed to Starship 2 since then and are going to launch Starship 3 imminently (slated this month), which has Raptor v3 engines onboard and come with the efficiency gains you are talking about.

venusenvy47 6mo ago

The booster is definitely looking good, just like the Falcon 9 booster is very reliable. The big question for me is the upper stage, and whether they will be able to reuse anywhere near as often as they claim. It is so much more complex than the Falcon upper stages, which aren't reusable very quickly. It seems they have a lot to learn about upper stage reusability.

rkagerer 6mo ago

I didn't realize there had been 3 tower catches? Can anyone link to good video footage of the last two?