It's worth remembering that, according to SpaceX's own filings, they've spent >$15 billion on the Starship program thus far with more to come. And SpaceX is burning cash still, particularly because Elon Musk bailed out his own bad decisions with Twitter and xAI with SpaceX stock, basically.

Flight 12 was a relative success. Some engines failed to light but that's an unintended good test. Rockets are typically designed such that they can have a certain number of engines fail and still achieve their mission.

At this point, the entire SpaceX project is a bet on telecommunications services, specifically direct-to-satellite handheld Internet. That's the only market that will recoup the program costs.

We don't have exact figures for the current true cost of a Falcon 9 launch factoring in reuse but many think it's somewhere betweenm $10 and $20 million. Well, SpaceX has spent 100 F9 launches on Starship so far and that's how you have to look at it. Say F9 is $20M and Starship once it starts launching Starlink is $10M that's 150-300+ launches just to break even.

You might be tempted to say there are other missions for Starship but there really aren't. Satellites aren't that bug, as evidences by there being ~1 Falcon Heavy launch per year (usually for the military and/or to geostationary orbit AFAICT). You can't economically put multiple payloads in one Starship because they all have different orbital parameters.

F9 is rated for human spaceflight. It's a long road for Starship to be certified for human spaceflight. SpaceX hasn't even begun to test in-orbit refuelling yet. Gases are weird in microgravity.

F9 is the cash cow funding all this and that too might go away if Blue Origin or one of the other wannabes ever gets a reusable launch platform to commercial operation.

There are big launches like interplanetary missions but those are few and far between.

It would be fascinating if what ends up dooming SpaceX is actually Twitter.

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mullingitover 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> At this point, the entire SpaceX project is a bet on telecommunications services, specifically direct-to-satellite handheld Internet. That's the only market that will recoup the program costs.

There's also a military angle here. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look into Musk's history with Michael D. Griffin from the Reagan SDI/'Star Wars' program.

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amluto 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s an awkward comparison, but F9 can deliver a payload to orbit at a slightly lower price per kg than a Tomahawk missile can deliver it to a target. Starship would be MUCH cheaper if the economics works out the way that SpaceX would like it to.

Obviously a few hundred kg of payload in orbit are not equivalent to the same payload delivered directly to a target.

	▲	mullingitover 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You don’t need very many kg delivered to target if it’s plutonium. The SDI program had the idea was that if you parked enough defensive weaponry in orbit then maybe mutually assured destruction wasn’t something you had to worry about. The only problem was that getting all that mass into orbit was prohibitively expensive. Then the deputy director of the program met a young man named Elon Musk, and the rest is history.

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fc417fc802 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> At this point, the entire SpaceX project is a bet on telecommunications services, specifically direct-to-satellite handheld Internet. That's the only market that will recoup the program costs.

I seriously doubt that. Just for example, mining a single asteroid has the potential to flood the market for any number of metals. I don't pretend to know how expensive it would be to achieve that in practice; my point is that there are quite a few different ways to recoup program costs at some handwavey point in the future.

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jmyeet 3 hours ago | parent [-]

If there were infinite gold bars just sitting on the surface of the moon, it wouldn't be economical to go collect them and bring them back to Earth. No matter how expensive you think any metals are here on Earth, the cost of launching vehicles, rendezvousing with said metals and bringing them back to Earth makes it uneconomical.

An asteroid is much, much further than that but more important than distance is the delta-V required for change its orbit to reach an Earth orbit. So you not only need to get there, which, as discussed, requires in-orbit refuelling with Starship (or any vehicle), but you have to carry all the fuel you need for the orbital burn to bring it back. The rocket equation just kills this immediately.

You really hope you have to get incredibly lucky that an metallic asteroid is on a near-intercept course with Earth that is just shy or going into orbit. The odds for that are, well, astronomical.

	▲	labcomputer an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That depends on how much a unit of delta-v costs. If you can do the whole mission for $100/kg, quite a few things become economical.

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aero-glide2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Revenue from xai renting to anthropic this year alone will be more than starlink and launch revenue

	▲	adgjlsfhk1 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Revenue from selling money at a discount isn't generally considered a good strategy.
	▲	jmyeet 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		xAI is burning through $1 billion a month [1]. With Anthropic as a customer, it's basically an argument that we're losing money on every transaction but we'll make it up in volume. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xa...

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gordonhart 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Say F9 is $20M and Starship once it starts launching Starlink is $10M that's 150-300+ launches just to break even.

Assuming they deliver the same payload, sure, but that’s very much not the plan.

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YetAnotherNick 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> That's the only market that will recoup the program costs.

No. If it is just $15B I can think of dozens different usecases ranging from military applications(fast transportation, it is the cheapest ICBM) to asteroid deflection to moon mining to science applications to space datacenter.

Are you seriously thinking $15B is big? Artemis by comparison has spent $93B and has cost of $4B per launch.