What’s worse for musk - china launched and landed its own reusable rocket. Successfully landed. Spacex only cash cow now have a solid competition from china. Tesla is already losing globally to byd, no reason to believe margins gonna improve there.

So when Spacex is going to close shop in a few months because of bankrupcy, all the “western” world needs to launch their fleets of espionage satellites in Chinese rockets? 😇

So if we assume they manage to build a fully rapidly reusable rocket and launch infrastructure (the latter of which is incredibly questionable), the only marginal cost increase is just labor to conduct the launches and consumables.

And the physics says more like 17 launches, but at the end of the day, that’s just how much it costs to send 200 tons to the moon, AND bring the rocket back. They’re not jettisoning stages or leaving the rocket behind in the moon like Apollo.

The numbers are mind boggling, and short of nuclear rockets and space elevators, there is literally no way to do this short of many, many, many tiny launches, and it’s way less risky to have those tiny launches refill a tanker in LEO than to send 20 launches to the moon independently. Plus there would be no way to send large pre assembled components like nuclear reactors and construction/manufacturing equipment. Everything would have to be manufactured and assembled on the moon.

neat. so let’s not do it until we can do it without funding a nazi, a capitalist, or a war criminal?

So I’m not sure what the marginal cost per launch is. I remember reading that the propellant between Starship and Supeheavy is something like $100M per launch, which would put 20 launches at around $2B and would make the re-usability not actually a cost saver vs. an expendable rocket. However, I just read the article below that says the launch cost is more like $3-$5M, so I may have been completely off base in my original assumption.

spaceorbitals.com/…/starship-v3-cost-per-kg-2026/

SpaceX has done some impressive engineering feats but so far the only part of the business that has been profitable is Starlink. More importantly, Elon merged his AI business into Starlink shortly before it went public. I read somewhere that approximately 93% of the value of the IPO was based on the AI side and its wildly speculative projections for future income.

My point is that it almost doesn’t matter what they do with Starship, the company is massively overvalued unless Grok suddenly becomes the most popular AI in the world and everyone begins tithing to it.