“Nobody really knows anything about SpaceX’s finances,” Lionnet said. “There is no balance sheet or financial report available. We have a very large company of 10,000 people – a prime contractor from NASA and the Department of Defense – and there is absolutely no information available about its financial health.”
In 2020, investment bank Morgan Stanley valued SpaceX at $100 billion, and its Starship rocket alone as a $11 billion business. Regular Starship flights, Morgan Stanley said, would make Starlink, SpaceX’s high-speed internet from the space service, profitable. By 2030, Starship would put 10,000 tons of cargo into orbit annually, according to the bank forecast. Mr Lionnet said for the math to work Starship would need to launch 46,000 tons by 2040. This is equivalent to launching 100 complete international space stations per year.
The implicit assumption, he said, is that if the launch price drops a lot, “you’re going to increase demand significantly.” But, he wonders, “What would be the point of all that mass?”
He added that there is one case where the numbers work for SpaceX.
“It could be that SpaceX’s goal is essentially not to make a profit, but to go to Mars,” Lionnet said. “If you believe in that, nothing else really means anything. And when Musk comes for money, he always finds people to give it to him.”
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Seven hours after Crew-5 lifted off, another Falcon 9 was on a launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, three hours northwest of Los Angeles and much closer to SpaceX headquarters. The primary mission control facility was still monitoring the astronauts’ journey, so a second team worked in an adjacent, much smaller mission control center.
The customer for Wednesday’s second launch was SpaceX itself — the flight would launch 52 of the company’s Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. SpaceX currently has 3,200 of the satellites in space, with a goal of launching about 39,000 more in the coming years.
Behind a shroud of fog at the launch site was a rocket that had flown 13 times, and it fired off.
