this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
135 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
86354 readers
3187 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
If you took the state funding out of Space X how much money do they make?
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.
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.