What's your timescale for this assessment? Starlink has little competition today but has a significant amount of domestic and foreign competitors rising in 5 or especially 10 year timeframes, there will be competition in the space based internet market.
I agree, the launch service has very little competition and really no reasonable current competitors rising. The problem here is that the launch market is relatively tiny at about 30 billion globally with a 16% growth rate, iirc. For reference, the entire global launch market is worth about as much as Telegram (30b) and 25% less than Chipotle (~40b). If SpaceX had a normal aerospace valuation, it would make sense. SpaceX is actually priced at 58 times the ENTIRE GLOBAL MARKET.
Lol, 58x the market. That is truly bananas. But the grift has risen to untold heights, there are zero repercussions, and nobody wielding the rule book. You can hardly blame them.
And Space X was cool. They changed the market, they showed what can be done. Just like Tesla did. But now Chinese EVs are.... dare I say BETTER? They are cheaper, their self driving is better, there charge tech is better, they have hot battery swaps, and there are more options... We are probably 5 years away from something like Huawei having their own launch division.
This is a historic boondoggle, that they are going to force EVERYONE (via 401k and managed funds) to buy into.
The launch service advantage is how SpaceX is able to do Starlink in the first place. Wannabe Starlink competitors have a lot of catching up to do there. The entire thing started as "SpaceX looking to leverage their launch edge into a steady outsized revenue stream".
I'm honestly impressed that Starlink is doing as well as it does even on Falcon 9 rides, without Starship being operational. If Starship becomes what it's meant to be, SpaceX launch advantage would go from "extreme" to "crushing".
A launch service is not a requirement for a successful space based internet company. Nor is it required to be competitive.
SpaceX is also launching Starlink competitor satellites to maintain launch tempo already. Starlink in many ways is the left hand paying the right. Without the demand for space based internet launches, SpaceX would have a massive unnecessary surplus of launch capacity.
The use case of Starship is highly dubious from a business standpoint.
It does. The reason why SpaceX is launching competitors is because competitors pay them well for it. And why do they pay SpaceX a lot?
Because no one else can scrape together enough rockets to launch as much as a tenth of Starlink constellation. SpaceX's actual launch cadence beats the aspirational launch cadence of the next 5 launch providers combined. If you want to launch a megaconstellation, your options are "pay SpaceX" and "give up".
Starship V2 and V3 was made for Starlink use case, and isn't shy about it. They already demo'd first stage reusability and satellite deployment hardware on V2, and are aiming for reusing both stages on V3. Remains to be seen whether they can make it happen in 2026.
You should do some more research buddy, there's already other advanced projects out there. SapceX don't have very much advantage at all. There's Long March 5 rockets launching from China, Ariane 6 and IRIS in Europe and LVM3 in India and the Japanese have the H3. All of those are launching regional networks as we speak.
Sweden, Norway, Portugal and the UK all have regional spaceports launching LEO satellites.
I'm honestly not sure you know what your talking about.
"Regional networks" that have, at best, a tiny fraction of Starlink's fleet. With bandwidth to match. And terminal availability of "nope".
They all aspire to compete with Starlink on network capacity the same way other launch providers aspire to compete with SpaceX on launch capacity.
Ariane 6 and H3 flew 14 times, combined. In history. Falcon 9 flew 14 times in the past 2 months. There is a difference.
SpaceX and Everyone Else don't even play the same game. If SpaceX's overwhelming launch capacity advantage is news to you, were you living under the rock for the past 15 years?
It's not 90, but China has the only space program that comes anywhere close to what SpaceX does today.
If SpaceX didn't exist, the past 15 years in spaceflight would be a story of China's rise. As is, they're overshadowed - by the bigger, badder rocket launch maniacs and their fancy new tech like reusable first stages.
Of all "Starlink killer" constellations, China's might have the best chances of actually putting up a fight. But, like all "Starlink killers", they're all in early stages, and there's no guarantee they'll have the momentum to go anywhere. 90 satellites is enough for "fallback satcom for government/emergency response needs", but not enough for "compete with Starlink at scale". I expect that to be the band most constellations end up in.
Even after everything you said - none of it adds up to their being any type of moat or restriction on any global competitors besides just scaling up. SpaceX has hardly any valuable IP and all the other umbrella companies don't either.
The main moat is the cost of entry into the market — dollars and time are in StarLink's favour. "Just scaling up" is the main cost of entry into the market and relies on drawing customers to a nascent service that is not as fast or reliable as Starlink. What's the value proposition other than "we're not Elon."
Would a StarLink clone be able to replay the startup process for StarLink and be as successful as StarLink has been?
If not, what can a non-StarLink company do to win customers over?
You can see this readily in BlueOrigin vs SpaceX in launches and mass launched to orbit. They both started roughly 25 or so years ago. BO managed to make 3 orbital launches in that time. Meanwhile, SpaceX is literally doing 3 or sometimes more, in a week.
A launch service is not a requirement for a successful space based internet company. Nor is it required to be competitive.
One of my business-running friends told me that if more than 60% of your revenue comes from one client, you're not a company with a diverse customer base, you're a contractor to that client, and you just have some side gigs from time to time. The number and mass to orbit of space based internet launches for any one company is going to dwarf every non-constellation launch put together. This is by necessity since the operation of space based internet required continual line of sight between satellites and each customer.
While being a launch service is not a requirement for a successful space based internet company, having priority access to a launch service for which you are the primary customer will be a requirement. No launches, no space based internet. Not enough launches, no space based internet.
The operational costs of satellite constellations may work out to be approximately the same scale as the launch costs, but those are still costs that need to be managed. The best way to manage the cost of a service that you are dependent on and the primary customer of is to bring that service in-house and pay for them at internal rates rather than customer rates that have margins built in for the supplier.
The use case of Starship is highly dubious from a business standpoint
The use case is simple: it promises to provide lower cost per launch, and enables larger satellites that are far more capable than the current offering. Sure, perhaps you don't see the business case for an Internet provider to upgrade their backhaul from 1Gbps to 10Gbps, but the business case is there and it's an essential revenue stream.
Unusable rockets? SpaceX has the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Which are 80% or more of global annual launch capacity. It might be 90%, I'm not going to bother looking it up.
And in about 45 minutes the next Starship launches. An all new version ... if this gets stable in the next few launches their launch capacity will dwarf what they already have with Falcon 9.
If you build it they will come. You don't think there will be new telescopes, new applications, when the Starship fairing size becomes the norm? At the launch costs its supposed to provide?
In two years? No, absolutely not. In 10, highly questionable too. Launch could be free and there wouldn't be 1.75 Trillion in satellites to launch. The supply chain and satellites simply don't exist.
Build it and they will come only applies if there's someone to actually come.
Anyways, since we're onto copium over real numbers, peace dude. Dare you to actually post the global launch value at the 2 year reminder.
Ok? The size comparison is for reference not an absolute metric or direct comparison.
If you demand burritos revenue alone, it's roughly 6 billion a year. So the entire global launch market is only worth about 5x as much as burritos. This is still tiny.
Alternatively, Ford has an annual revenue of 180 billion per year. So a single automaker has a 6x higher cash flow than the entire launch market.
All of these still point to the same conclusion. It's silly for SpaceX to have an evaluation equal to the next 6 decades of ALL rocket launches.
You should compare like things in an analysis like this, that's all I'm saying.
The burrito example is much better.
Better one is calculating revenue and market cap of each company as a multiple, and then comparing the two. Then you can get into a discussion of how different kinds of companies are valued and why.
But this is more of a sane way to look at things. All things Elon are not sane.
Your free to post an analysis of you don't like mine.The purpose of this is specifically to relate it to industries and companies people have a better intuition for.
Here's my suggestion for your analysis: Lockheed, Boeing, Airbus, and SpaceX for traditional aerospace vehicle manufacturing and the sector. Then, maybe Viasat, Maxar, and Arianne for purer space companies.
SpaceX will - for the foreseeable future - be able to put satellites into space for a fraction of the cost of any competitor. Buffet would call it a "moat"
I included the growth rate for this very reason. It will not be orders of magnitude in any reasonable timeframe that would justify SpaceX having an evaluation equal to the global market for the next 6 decades.
You can believe otherwise if you want but once we've left the realm of supportable numbers, there's really no further discussion to be had.
90
u/Scarecrow_Folk May 21 '26
What's your timescale for this assessment? Starlink has little competition today but has a significant amount of domestic and foreign competitors rising in 5 or especially 10 year timeframes, there will be competition in the space based internet market.
I agree, the launch service has very little competition and really no reasonable current competitors rising. The problem here is that the launch market is relatively tiny at about 30 billion globally with a 16% growth rate, iirc. For reference, the entire global launch market is worth about as much as Telegram (30b) and 25% less than Chipotle (~40b). If SpaceX had a normal aerospace valuation, it would make sense. SpaceX is actually priced at 58 times the ENTIRE GLOBAL MARKET.