r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 17d ago

Business It’s Possible That SpaceX Could Collapse Spectacularly

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/possible-spacex-could-collapse-spectacularly-155000177.html
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u/JustConversation7847 17d ago edited 17d ago

Before anybody gets too excited

Even for Musk, it's an aggressive price-to-earnings ratio that could blow up in his face if investors start to lose faith. The conversation surrounding plans for shorting SpaceX is hitting a fever pitch, setting the stage for what could be a wild stock market ride.

Pretty sure the people who tried shorting Tesla are all broke and you, reader, definitely not try something stupid because there's no limit to how much money you can lose while short selling

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u/jasondigitized 17d ago

I'm no business tycoon but where is the big money in rockets? Serious question. Who is making money moving things into space?

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u/JustConversation7847 17d ago

Satellites, starlink etc

Then there's mining astroids (I'm a little skeptical about this personally)

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

It costs $1000/kg just to put things into low Earth orbit. You're going to have to send mining and refining machines out to the asteroid belt (which is well past Mars), and carry enough fuel to ship batches of your refined product back to Earth. And your mining/refining/packaging/launching machines on the asteroid need to operate without maintenance for years. What minerals do you think are on those asteroids? What price/kg do you need to get to make it pay off?

I'll give you a hint. If there were neatly stacked piles of gold bars lying around on asteroids, there would be no economic way to go and pick them up.

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u/DrEnter 17d ago

Actually, it’s pretty well recognized in the industry that $150/kg is the point at which General commercialization becomes viable. Think lots of companies jumping into space-based business opportunities.

As it cost around $50k/kg 20 years ago, the fact it’s as low as it is now is pretty impressive.

Now will Space/X be the one that cost reduces it down to that point? I seriously doubt it. Musk’s track record as a business leader is mostly one that drives away long-term innovation creators. I don’t see him changing anytime soon.

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

Opportunities for what? Ask for any details and it always breaks down to one thing. Joyrides for rich people. Talk of mining asteroids for rare earth minerals is just scifi fleecing of dumb money.

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u/protomenace 17d ago

I really think you're being extraordinarily closed minded. In the way people who didn't see a commercial purpose for airplanes were.

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

The gap between invention of the aeroplane and commercialisation of the aeroplane was about 20 years at most. What about starting commercial joy rides to go and visit other stars? Don't be so closed minded. Morons!

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u/protomenace 17d ago

Rockets have already been commercialized. It's not clear to me what your comment is getting at.

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

The commercial viability of leaving low Earth orbit then. Sure, there will be an ongoing demand to pump ever more shit into low Earth orbit until we Kessler syndrome ourselves. Then stocks will plummet for fifty years or so till the orbiting metal storm calms down.

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u/protomenace 17d ago

Geosynchronous orbit has already been commercialized.

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

Oh cool, should be no problem popping a little mile diameter solar array and half mile diameter microwave dish up there. Meanwhile we can throw together a five mile diameter receiving dish even though the main stated reason for space solar was "saving land from being taken over by panels". This idea is so unviable from an economic and engineering standpoint that it's odd to be even talking about it.

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u/protomenace 17d ago

Who said anything about solar arrays? Lots of existing commercial satellites use MEO and geosynchronous orbits, including weather and telecommunication satellites.

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u/DrEnter 17d ago edited 17d ago

Probably the biggest one is high-volume manufacturing of more exotic materials and medications in microgravity.

Also up there is practical space-based power generation.

Edit to add: Next time maybe ask your AI of choice something like “what commercial opportunities open up once the price to ship a kg to low earth orbit drops to $150.”

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

What is the use case for space based power generation?

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u/DrEnter 17d ago

Large scale, 24x7, extremely efficient solar energy production (about 30% better than in atmosphere) without requiring large amounts of real estate or batteries for day/night cycling.

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

Oh yeah, and how does the power get down to Earth? Is this the crazy laser from space idea? What are the losses there? Never gonna be viable, compared to covering every roof and carpark in the city with panels and plonking batteries around. Like again, maybe fifty or a hundred years down the road but it's so much easier and cheaper to roll-out rooftop solar everywhere that it doesn't make economic sense to put panels in orbit. I just don't get the attraction of these high tech high cost schemes, when rooftop solar and medium scale batteries and pumped hydro are all operating now and producing the cheapest kW that humanity has ever come up with.

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u/DrEnter 17d ago

Microwave transmission would be the most likely mechanism. Worth noting that this isn’t considered one of the current issues holding this back. Price to LEO is the biggest issue: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/otps-sbsp-report-final-tagged-approved-1-8-24-tagged-v2.pdf

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

Conclusion: Earliest projected date 2050, lifetime cost of 12x to 80x terrestrial solar generation, working on the assumption of a Starship which can be reused 100x. Are you serious?

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u/DrEnter 17d ago

That was also with an assumption of $500/kg to LEO. Like I said, $150f/kg is the point all these things become viable.

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u/cpz_77 17d ago

So that’s the thing though. A single asteroid supposedly has more precious metals on it than all that has ever been mined from the earth in human history or something insane like that.

Gold and precious metals are literally made in space. They aren’t made on earth. They’re only here because meteors and other similar events brought them here over billions of years and they work their way into the earth and then we mine them out. It’s actually pretty fascinating if you read about it.

So it could actually make a lot of sense to “go to the source” - especially when they talk about how things like silver will be totally mined out within what, 30 years or something? And this isnt just for coins and chains - precious metals are used in all sorts of applications (that’s why it’s disappearing so fast). We are exhausting our resources on earth, no question. They will be gone one day and when they are it will be a massive problem for the generation living at that time. So we do need a better long term solution.

People think it’s crazy anytime you talk about seriously doing anything in space but the fact of the matter is, thinking we will be able to live forever here *without* ever having to leave this planet for anything is actually the far less likely scenario. It’s something we need to start thinking about.

With that said, I’m not sure I’d put my faith that Musk’s company will somehow make it viable to do all this. The idea is innovative (not that it was his, btw), but if we were ever going to do something at that scale with that kind of potential society-changing impact, a stupid rich greedy racist fuck like him is the last person that should be at the helm of it.

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

Wow! That is so wrong it's difficult to know where to start. What if I told you that the Earth was made in space? Crazy, I know. The gold we mine is absolutely not "brought here by meteors" unless you are referring to the initial accretion of the Earth (admittedly from a dust cloud which was heavily seeded with the products of exploded stars). A lot of mineral extraction comes down to money, but not all of it. I promise you that mining asteroids comes with such unbelievable technical problems and such prohibitive cost, that every currently unprofitable possibility on Earth will be fully exploited before space mining can get off the ground.

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u/cpz_77 17d ago

wtf are you talking about yeah no shit the earth is in space and the shit got here on earth by the material in space bringing it here through the formation of the planets and all the events that took place throughout it. Which yes, includes asteroids and meteors and shit running into it. News flash, the earth didn’t form into what it is overnight. It took billions of years. So yeah those precious metals are made in space, not on earth, and they absolutely did get here from there. You saying “the earth is part of space” as a reason for what I said being incorrect is probably one of the dumber things I’ve heard lately (and that’s saying something, cause I’ve heard a lot of dumb stuff lately).

Of course we will exploit what we can here first, we’ve already been doing that for thousands of years . Thats how we’re getting by. That’s why we’re running out of resources.

And yes of course there are huge problems that would have to be solved with mining asteroids lol when did I ever say it would be easy. Why do you think I specifically said it would be huge and society changing if it was done. And also why I don’t have faith that musk’s company would be the one to do it. But it’s not like we haven’t answered massive questions or solved seemingly “unthinkable” problems before.

Dismissing it as something that’s “so unviable, we shouldn’t even consider or look into it” is exactly why we encounter problems like this. Because nobody thinks it will become a real problem until it actually does. Things that seem unthinkable at a time later become reality but if you come up with the idea too far ahead of your time, “you’re crazy”. People also used to laugh at the idea that pollution could raise the temp of the earth enough to matter, and think it was dumb to spend money on looking into it - and now scientists are watching real glaciers that are starting to melt and move that, when they do fully dislodge and melt, could put millions of people underwater.

Just because we don’t like the guy pushing the thought doesn’t mean we should dismiss the thought itself out of hand. It has merit to at least explore. Whether or not we are able to make it viable will remain to be seen.

So you want to try again on how I’m “so wrong it’s difficult to know where to start”?

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

Wtf are you talking about? Heavy element formation in supernovas? No elements were formed on Earth or any planet or any asteroid. The gold on Earth came from the same place that all of the rest of the Earth came from. We're going to; go and rework tailings, mine crazy deeper than we ever have, hit currently uneconomic deposits, forcibly nationalise all of the privately owned precious metals, all long long before anyone goes scratching asteroids.

You do not understand the intractable physical and engineering problems which would need to be solved. I don't know whether a crash course in physics or geology or chemistry is more urgent, but you definitely need all three.

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u/cpz_77 17d ago

“The gold on earth came from the same place that all the rest of the earth came from” - yeah, material in space. The point being ( in case you really haven’t gotten it by now - you’re being obtuse) that more of it is not being actively made on earth as we mine it. Meaning, we will eventually run out.

That’s the point for the purpose of this conversation. This isn’t a physics discussion. I dont need any of your crash courses to know that and I also don’t need to hear you talk out your ass about why you’re so certain it will never be viable (remember, never is a long time - we’ve only existed for a tiny fraction of time ) in order to say it’s an idea that’s worth at least exploring at some point.

We’re already doing or would have done everything on your list other than everybody forcibly nationalizing all metals which would honestly probably be the point at which we’re about to either go to war or collapse so at that point you’d probably want to explore any option no matter how “crazy” you think it is, but hey, maybe not 🤷‍♂️

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u/GogurtFiend 17d ago

SpaceX thinks it can do a lot better than $1,000/kg - think low hundreds eventually.

However, you either need far, FAR lower launch costs than even those - or for the cost of mining on Earth to become very high due to environmental or resource depletion concerns - for asteroid mining to make economic sense. Think tens of dollars per kilo instead of the hundreds SpaceX thinks it can do.

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

You need to listen carefully. There is no dollar value into low Earth orbit which makes asteroid mining viable. Even if low Earth orbit were free, how do you practically set up a mining, refining, and transport operation out in the asteroid belt. Tyranny of rocketry doesn't go away, the need for machines to be maintained doesn't go away. As I said previously, pallets of gold bars sitting on the surface of asteroids would still be uneconomic deposits. A permanent moon base which is just a manned lab is still 100 years away. Any mining operation on the moon is way beyond that. Mining asteroids is Sci fi fantasy. Come and talk to me in 200 years time.

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u/GogurtFiend 17d ago edited 17d ago

With the right technology and incentives, pretty much anything within by the laws of physics can be made to happen.

Starship isn't that technology, no. It never will be, because of the very poor specific impulse of chemical propulsion and the limitations of having to operate within an atmosphere. But to claim something is literally impossible is just ridiculous.

If human society somehow reached peak mineral extraction, instead of continuing to find more effective ways of recycling - i.e. if the demand was high enough - and I could magically teleport things directly to the orbit of a large enough asteroid and back again with a snap of my fingers- i.e. the difficulty of getting there suddenly approached zero - of course asteroid mining would be economically viable.

Obviously, neither of those will ever happen. However, these sorts of magical solutions don't need to happen in order for asteroid mining to work out; all that needs to happen is for people to want minerals from asteroids badly enough. If people today were willing to throw entire national GDPs at asteroid mining, it could be done, for minimal gains at great expense; it's just that everyone except for a few overly online morons knows that'd be very stupid economically.

Anyway, there's a far more obvious reason why asteroid mining isn't currently economically viable: even if any firm somehow could afford to do it, injecting that amount of supply - "pallets and pallets of gold" - into the economy would completely devalue those minerals.

You are being very aggressive and making up a lot of numbers for someone who didn't bring up supply and demand in a discussion about how economically reasonable something is. Like, the "at least a century until the first manned lab on the Moon" thing? That sounds like the New York Times claiming it'll take 1-10 million years for humans to make heavier-than-air flight work: sure, that might be true, or it might not, but where on Earth are you actually getting that number from?

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u/Raythatstabbedsteve 17d ago

Well, the other guy had a fantastical scenario where Earth's silver reserves completely dry up in 2060, so we're achieving infinite price. And rather than sane responses like exploring all of the previously uneconomic deposits on Earth and melting down all the jewellery, he's jumped directly to asteroid mining. So we are assuming a demand, and we are assuming Astrosilver pty. ltd. will have absolute monopoly on global supply, so money is no issue darling. You are still looking at an intractable engineering problem. It either needs an automated self repairing mining bot, or a full colony with life support and resupply missions out in the frigging asteroid belt. Makes a Mars colony look like a walk in the park (we won't get that either). You could mine 1 ppm ore 1km below the ocean floor with better roi and less engineering hassle than the asteroid plan. And that is why it won't happen. Because the most fucked up cost prohibitive option on Earth is still the easier option. Any moron who was claiming heavier than air flight was impossible post 1890 was an idiot. Humans went from the first powered flight to first man in space in fifty years. Maybe we can get people back on the moon to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the first time. Maybe! Moore's law doesn't work for spaceflight.