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SpaceX Is Now One of the World's Most Valuable Privately Held Companies (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Elon Musk's aerospace company SpaceX is now valued at $21.2 billion, knocking off WeWork as the fourth most valuable privately held tech company in America. This skyrocket in valuation comes after another round of funding that raised $351 million for the company. According to Equidate, a marketplace for trading private tech company stocks, SpaceX's price per share is now $135, up from $96.42 prior to the new funding round. The latest valuation makes SpaceX one of the top five most valuable private, venture-backed tech companies in the US, joining Uber ($69.8B), Airbnb ($31B), WeWork ($20.8B), and the less consumer-facing analytics company Palantir ($21.3B). (SpaceX previously held the sixth spot before Snap, Inc. went public in March.) All five companies are disruptive forces in their respective industries, and also top the world's most valuable startups alongside Didi Chuxing and Xiaomi, as first pointed out by The New York Times. Last year, SpaceX was valued at $14.6 billion.
naah. that one gave a good solid boost to the summary and landed right on the mark.
But once they can relyably reuse their rockets on a regular basis, price to orbit will drop by orders of magnitude and change humanities entire perspective on space travel, Neuromancer style. SpaceX could easily become the most valuable company ever on an entirely new scale.
Orders of magnitude? No. Musk said fuel is currently about 3% of total launch cost. One order of magnitude would make that 30%, two orders would be 300%. Unless you can work magic in fuel efficiency and do the rest for free, not happening. Even with Musk's most generous long time full reuse scenario (where a booster has 1000 launches, tanker 100 and the spaceship 12 and the refurb costs are minimal like <0.1% on the booster and <1% on the tanker) he's estimating $140/kg to Mars surface. Until you got a working fuel production plant on Mars so the spaceship can return - a highly theoretical idea at the moment - then $520/kg. And I'm pretty sure that doesn't include development costs, this is purely marginal costs but let's ignore those.
So for a person ~$50k minimum ticket price, of course that doesn't include air, water, food, heating, shielding or anything else you'd need on a months-long trip through space. Or anything you'd need to survive on Mars a couple years, if not you personally then all the people working there maintaining the base and supporting you. I'm thinking $200k at least. So after being stuck in a tin can for months you're stuck in a slightly bigger dome for 2.5 years and even though you can go outside it's not exactly like home. Then some more months in a tin can before you land back on earth and discover your muscles haven't tried 1G for almost three years. And unlike a submarine that can actually abort and surface if they have to, that's not an option here.
I think the novelty of it will wear off real quick and after three years you'll feel more like a supermax prisoner that's finally out of jail than anyone who has had the experience of a lifetime. That is unless there's any system failure of any kind along the way where you'll most likely end up dead. Don't get me wrong, the first to go will be super-celebrities and all that so that will be cool. But when you're like the 834th person on Mars, eh... and it's not like you're climbing Mount Everest or something, you're probably doing routine maintenance most the time. I should probably also remind you that nobody has come up with any commercially viable business on Mars - at best it's reducing the costs so Earth won't have to pay as much to support a Mars outpost. It still takes political will to fund it, cost-plus or fixed price.
Or maybe I should put this in a TL;DR form: Even if Musk achieves everything he wants to do, most space sci-fi will remain fiction.
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If you want 'affordable' access to the Solar system, it looks like you're going to be going through SpaceX to get it.
That's not really worth much right now, because they haven't actually delivered it yet. You might think the expense of a rocket isn't a big deal because satellites and other things we want to get into space are expensive enough to justify the rocket's cost... but have you considered that the reason we're shipping expensive things out of our gravity well is because the rockets' costs mean less expensive items can't be justified?
If space access is inexpensive enough, we'll find more to do. Asteroid retrieval will get a massive kick in the ass (which will have massively disruptive effects on Earth but be really good for us in the long run). Space stations will be less expensive, enabling more research into keeping humans healthy off Earth. Lunar and Mars missions will be less expensive, giving us more capability to prep for humans to permanently occupy those bodies and see if we can make self-sufficient operations there.
There's a lot of really, really hard work to do to get there, but most of it is pointless if we can't even affordably reach Earth orbit. SpaceX is our current hope for getting us to the point that all that other work becomes meaningful.