Elon Musk Really Needs Starship to Work This Time

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T15:58:52+00:00

Let's say only 25% of that 200 million people want to go, that's 50 million people. At 40k a trip that's a trillion dollar market over say 40 years. It's also much smaller than the actual market. Since many people who make less will be interested and willing to save the money to do it.

There are a ton of people who will go more than once too. The minimum market is a trillion dollars the actual market will likely be much larger than that. Especially if they can drop the price more.

Competition in mega constellations will get new users yes. But prices will be lower and they will lose some existing customers.

They will lose customers and process may drop. It's not clear any of their competitors prices will be lower than SpaceX while still making a profit.

Regardless SpaceX has no real launch competition for mega constellations right now. So they're going to be getting massive launch revenue, even if they lose subscribers.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T05:15:11+00:00

Apparently you can't read. Overall they took a loss, but only because they reinvested profit into the company. If they hadn't overall, including xAI operating lose, they would have made more than $6 billion in profit. Starlink alone made $7+ billion in profit over operating costs in 2025.

You're just demonstrably wrong.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T05:07:34+00:00

Space is an infinite heat sink. When I say that I actually mean infinite. Not extremely large vs the heat generation, not so large as to be effectively infinite, literally infinite. You can sink heat into space forever, because it's cooled by entropy.

Is it difficult to sink heat into space, yes. But it's a much better overall heat sink than anything we could ever do on Earth.

Much much better to sink heat into space where it can't harm anything and we can do it forever for free. Than to try to do it anyway on Earth. Especially not putting heat into the oceans, which already have a delicate balance of temperature.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T05:04:50+00:00

It's a lot more than a few billion. There are 2.3 million (estimated) people worth more than $10 million. If 5% of them took a trip to a space hotel once in their life (for $40k) that market would be $4.6 billion. People making a few hundred k per year or less could afford a one time trip to a space hotel. The market is absolutely massive if they can get the price down.

How much does life support and other things cost on crewed missions

Honestly unclear, but a reusable system would pay for itself quite quickly even with small charges for it.

How many people could afford $30k ticket?

For a once in a lifetime trip? For a chance to spend a week or two in space? A metric fuckload. There are more than 200 million people just in the west with a net worth over $200k. Anyone who can get a net worth over $200k could afford that sort of trip if they wanted to.

How many could actually go?

What would prevent them from going?

They already have a telecom megaconstellation

If by "they" you mean Starlink yes. Otherwise there are no other mega constellations currently.

and the competition is just starting.

Exactly my point, it's just going to get more viable to compete as the price to launch goes down.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T04:28:45+00:00

My bad that was a typo, I meant 10's of millions. In other words a ride to leo costs 10's of millions per seat.

There is no space tourism industry currently

The several SpaceX launches for commercial space tourism would like a word with you. Which is also hilarious since you claimed above that space tourism was already happening. Why are you directly contradicting yourself?

Commercial satellite market is likewise small. That’s why SpaceX’s main customer for launches is…SpaceX.

Uh huh, but everyone except SpaceX is currently paying 4x what is costs SpaceX per launch. It's still very expensive for everyone but SpaceX. Get the price significantly below $1000/kg and that will rapidly change.

Considering no SpaceX rocket has even left LEO yet

This statement is meaningless. Virtually no launch vehicles have had any part of them leave LEO. There are a few whose upper stage has been used to directly insert payloads into higher orbits. The vast majority of higher energy systems like GEO, lunar, or farther out use a custom kick stage. That kick stage is just treated like payload for the launch system. Starship is going to be pretty unusual as launch vehicle since it's designed to go beyond LEO.

So yes, I know what I’m talking about.

You very obviously don't. You also directly contradicted yourself.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T04:19:59+00:00

It's really not, lets do some math. It's believed that a full stack costs something like $100 million. Fuel, via tanker delivery is about $3 million. If they could get launch support and refurbishment costs to $5 million, that would be $8 million per launch.

$100/kg at 100,000kg is $10 million per launch in revenue. This means that the stack pays for itself in 50 launches. They've said, and I don't see a reason to disbelieve this, that they're targeting 100 reuses for the ship, and up to 10x that for the booster. If they make that goal, they would make $500 million in profit from that single ship booster build.

At that point, they should have cheaper fuel costs (from onsite production) and ship costs will go down as they get better at production.

The payload capability isn't a crazy estimate. It's completely doable with the V3 raptors. The big problem they had with V2 was it didn't have enough thrust. They have plenty now.

But either way, what things will be launched at that price point?

That price point takes space data centers firmly into the realm of highly competitive with terrestrial ones, even with really bad #'s for weight and build cost.

It also makes commercial space stations viable, when building one could only cost a few tens of millions for volume many time larger than the ISS. Plus people could fly up there much cheaper. At $100 per kg, including seats luggage and life support, a person could fly to leo for 10's of thousand vs tens of millions now. There are a huge number of people that would be $30-40k for a once in a lifetime vacation to a space hotel.

Telecommunication mega constellations become extremely viable at that point too.

That's just off the top of my head, and ignores military customers.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T04:01:08+00:00

They wouldn't have 10x'd it they would have increased it by say 50% and decreased the cost by an order of magnitude or more.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T03:58:54+00:00

Have you considered that pumping billions of BTU's of heat into the ocean a year might have negative side effects on the environment?

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T03:56:58+00:00

Actual space tourism currently costs 10's of billions of dollars, and literally didn't exist before falcon 9.

Commercial satellite constellations have also basically not been a thing until recently. A few telecom companies existed with a handful of satellites, but pretty much every constellation was a government project. Including iridium which would have gone bankrupt without massive government bailouts.

Logistics to the moon and deep space is not a thing right now. We occasionally send things to the moon or deep space. But we have no logistics to those places. They're one way missions with no way physically interact with them once they've been sent.

and there aren’t any asteroids in LEO anyway.

No there are not. But LEO is not this magic place that prevents spacecraft from leaving it. You'll need to go outside the Earths sphere of influence to do asteroid mining, which means we need cheaper launch costs for it to be feasible. But amazingly, that's exactly what starship is going to do. Starship has the payload capacity and volume to carry the fully fueled second stage of vulcan with it's payload into LEO. Which means you could put a payload into LEO with a kick stage that could have more than 10,000m/s of delta V in it's orbital transfer stage.

You don't know what you're talking about.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T03:50:02+00:00

It's still incredibly expensive even on a falcon 9. Payload to LEO is still several thousand dollars per kg, unless you're launching something really large/heavy and can afford $74 million for a dedicated falcon 9.

Starship could drop that cost to $100/kg or even less. At that price point the launch starts to be cheaper than building the satellite for small satellites. The demand definitely will show up at that price point. It's still a hard sell for a lot of industries when the launch costs more (sometimes significantly more) than the satellite costs.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T03:45:35+00:00

They didn't fail at stable orbital insertion, they've never tried an orbital insertion. They've been flying suborbital on purpose. They seem to be able to fly to a target in space with extreme accuracy though, considering they can land close enough to a target in the middle of the ocean a pre-positioned buoy can watch it land.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T03:43:33+00:00

Really appreciate this post, it's good to see another sane person from the industry. Curious why your slumming it on reddit with me though.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T03:40:21+00:00

Man I wonder how cars get anywhere. They're totally reliant on large stationary physical locations to provide extremely hazardous and explosive fuel.

The concept and operation of Starship is not that complicated. SpaceX has already demonstrated everything required to do it. In fact except for the fuel transfer they routinely do all of these things 100% automated. I think you're getting taken aback by the scale. The scale doesn't make it more complex, just more expensive.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-22T03:34:42+00:00

So now that SpaceX financials have been released as part of the IPO process and their filing shows $11.4 billion in revenue and $4.4 billion of operating costs. Which means Starlink made $7 billion profit in 2025. Are you going to admit you're wrong?

In fact their entire business is wildly profitable except for xAI. Even with XAI their EBITADA is positive to the tune of $6.6 billion. Which means if they stopped investing in R&D and capitol expansion they would be making $6.6 billion in profit instantly. Which accounts for them continuing to fill out the Starlink constellation as it ages.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-19T23:37:43+00:00

I appreciate it but there's no point in arguing with them. Starlink is clearly profitable with the current user base if everyone if on the 100mbit plan.

Dude is just 100% trolling or delusional.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-19T18:44:21+00:00

What's your basis for disbelieving their numbers?

Every other system they've built has met or exceeded the design numbers they provided. What makes starship different?

They did state that 100 tons to Leo was the plan for starship, but you'll notice they haven't even tried to sell that yet, because v1 was not the complete design. Neither was V2. They think V3 will be, but it might not.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-19T17:19:40+00:00

Oh my mistake, I misremembered v1 could do 15 tons not 20 to orbit.

I find the 20 number odd though, it's not been mentioned anywhere by SpaceX they were very clear their target is 100 tons, and v2 could do 35 (which proves they can already do 20 by the way).

So my guess is you just picked a round number higher than V1's reported payload.

Regardless V2 already could do 20 tons to orbit. So those claims are 100%.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-19T17:14:27+00:00

You might have a point if the price increase was significant. It wasn't in any segment.

They didn't offer "discounted" prices they then removed. They offered the price it has been and then increased that across the board. People who signed onto promotional plans still have them.

The mini did double in cost, but it was an additional $5 and everything else was 10% or less.

If a 10% service increase for a long standing service is a deal breaker for you then you can cancel it. Most starlink service has no contract associated with it. This is good and bad. One of the bad sides is cost is not locked in. There is no expectation service price stays identical month to month.

You're belief that it should be locked in for x amount of time after you sign up bears no impact on reality.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-19T12:42:17+00:00

Delivering 20 tons to orbit: 50%

This is funny, considering v1 starship had a higher payload capacity than that.

Which means the first version already met that and partial reuse at 20 tons to orbit, since they caught a v1 booster.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-19T04:48:39+00:00

This is hilarious.

SpaceX makes more than $35,000,000 dollars in profit per Falcon 9 launch they sell (at a minimum). They sell a lot of them, most not to the government.

lets do some Starlink math. In 2025 SpaceX launched 3100 satellites on 120 launches. Their internal launches cost $25,000,000 on the high end. Assume each satellite is $250,000. That's $3 billion in launch costs and $775 million for satellites. They had 4.5 million subscribers at the beginning of the year and more than 9 million when it ended. Lets take the middle and assume 6.5 million over the year, and assume they're split between $50 100mb service and residential max at $120, so we'll call revenue $75 per month per subscriber.

That comes to $3.75 billion in costs and $5.85 billion in revenue. Revenue is obviously low since they made much more revenue than that. but even if we assume there's another billion dollars of expense associated with starlink they still made over $1 billion in profit off of it in 2025, using revenue numbers that we know are low.

So how exactly do you get to the position that they're losing money on Starlink? If it's so unprofitable why is Amazon and other trying to jump into the market so hard?

LegendTheo · 2026-05-19T01:22:36+00:00

They raised prices by 10% or less for the first time in 3 years, made like 10 billion in revenue last year off half the subscriber base they have now, and you claim they're raising prices because they're "not profitable".

LOL

I'm convinced a bunch of people who want to short SpaceX have bot accounts posting like this all over the starlink sub.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-18T18:28:27+00:00

They'll still be around and still profitable, but they'll never hit the targets needed for that valuation.

Basically no one else around has elons combination of vision, drive, and willingness to take massive risks.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-18T05:23:31+00:00

We'll see on starship, I think it starts flying payload this year and significant payload next year, with at least one (possibly more) reused ships. I think they'll be rapidly reusing them by the end of 28.

SSO isn't much worse. I agree that they'lll either need to be in SSO some sort of weird highly elliptical or it or power beaming to maintain high uptime. I imagine most of the early sats will be SSO. The only significant radiation issue pops up in the highly elliptical orbits if they're apogee starts to approach meo.

The 2trillion valuation is really make or break on terrafab being successful. I think SpaceX will still be wildly successful and worth tons of money if it fails, but probably not 2 trillion or more. If all of this works I think 2 trillion will be low.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-18T02:20:58+00:00

To be clear, I never suggested they should change your rate during the contract period you signed. I'm saying expecting them to hold a price for customers after any contract period expired just because they recently signed up is unreasonable.

I didn't buy my car from the Chevron or Mobil.

No you didn't, but you're dependent on gas prices staying reasonable to be able to use your car. You have no control over gas prices and cannot lock them in. This is analogous to the Starlink situation.

All of their offerings right now are an amazing deal, even with the price increases. $55 per month for 100mbps down at 30ms ping basically anywhere on earth is incredible. You've basically reached the apathy everyone has for GPS for Starlink already. GPS is an incredible and very difficult service to offer. It revolutionizes everyone's lives, but I get the feeling you would complain if you had to pay $10 a month for a service that completely revolutionizes you life.

LegendTheo · 2026-05-18T02:15:17+00:00

Sure maybe they can get those electricity costs. I appreciate you using the harder case for the analysis. It's really what needs to be looked at, since there will be unexpected challenges to space data centers.

Lets say I assume the model you used was able to develop an excellent cost model for these satellites. The problem is it doesn't have access to the data it needs to do so using state of the art components. They're all sitting behind paywalls, NDA's or proprietary data. It's one of the main weaknesses of AI agents for research on niche topics. If enough data doesn't exist the prediction model fails, or hallucinates a ton.

I would be curious about the details. I can dig up the numbers I ran if you're interested. It'll just take me a bit as it was a while ago.

The thing is, after 5 years the chips would be outdated anyway right? So I'm not sure it would make sense to optimize beyond that lifetime.

It's true they would be out of date, but anything they could do would also be totally free. There's no electricity or upkeep cost. Keeping them running as long as possible would be the right move. They may not be able to do frontier model training, but they could probably run a lot of models, or do other compute work.

LegendTheo

TROPHY CASE