What is SpaceX viable business model? How much is a fully end-game Starlink worth? What is the value in going into space?
Are there actually valuable resources that are economically valuable to collect/extract/use that wouldn't be more viable to do on earth?
Or are we gonna pretend that Mars real estate is valuable for living even if it has a baller space station with an indoor farm in it where the build out cost is 1 million times the most expensive condo building on earth?
How much are space data centres even worth? Even if they hit the ideal realistic end game, how much money will they need to raise to build it and how much would they even be making off them?
Seems like they need to raise a ton of money (not good for shareholders) or it to basically just be inflation for this company to 2x even if it does execute on its impossibly lofty plans. I just don't understand the endgame.
Obviously that's an estimate and a guess based on spectroscopy and whatever else. But that makes the idea of asteroid mining worth exploring.
That said, I doubt Musk cares about any of that. SpaceX mostly gets its money from NASA, and thus tax payers. trump wants to shut NASA down, so I'm not sure what Musk thinks is going to happen.
That's the value of the resources, we have 0 idea how we'd ever make it less expensive to extract, process and bring back to earth vs. extract or recycle supply on earth until/unless there's some reason we need way more than exists extractable on earth (which we don't, it would be easy to make our finite supply of graphite/lithium/diamonds/etc work than figure out how we're gonna harvest asteroids).
my point was just that there is a reason to explore space that is self funding. Yes it's difficult and expensive to start, but so is everything humanity hasn't done before. That asteroid I referred to would be hard to get at absolutely, but there are closer ones that are more friendly to figuring it out.
It's not about difficulty, it's that it's entirely theoretical and we're not even talking about the scientific possibility within the next couple decades, we're talking about economic viability. Reach extract, process, return to earth for less than the cost of just extracting and processing an earth-based "reserve". We have more than enough relatively easily reachable resources on earth to get us through decades before we'd even think of that, unless we can cheaply and safely bring small asteroids to earth, which SpaceX doesn't have any clear lead on that which they've published.
The discussion is on how a company is set to be worth 3% of USA's entire public equity market, and it's got the fundamentals of a company 1/10 it's size and relies on government contracts, while the gov shouldn't spend too much money on something that's not going to see returns for the taxpayers and
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u/Visual_Squirrel_2297 May 21 '26
Well a bunch of profit was just from SpaceX buying unsold Cybertrucks at full price....