> They are moving faster than anyone in aerospace has ever moved before, but SpaceX is still accelerating faster than that. By the time they catch up, the game will have again changed.

That was a believable pitch up to around 2020 or so.

In 2018 they announced they were going to send a private crewed mission around the moon in 2023. Now we have the benefit of hindsight, it's 2026 and the vessel they were going to use has not yet had one circularised orbit.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but at this point Starship development is currently going slower than both the historical analogs, the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle.

You’re claiming in 10 years they made something others won’t for another century? This has no historical precedent.

China is going to eat them, just like they ate Teslas insurmountable lead in a few short years.

> The material wealth of the Earth is only a small, small fraction of the accessible material in the inner solar system, let alone the universe.

And you think you can access that in 30 years?

That's the problem here. Market valuations for, say, the USA, do not count the entire value of the nickel and iron down to the planet's core.

> Starship fundamentally changes the game in ways people aren’t paying attention to because it pattern matches to sci-fi. But the economics are real: power and material far beyond what is available on Earth, on many cases at lower marginal price than terrestrial sources, and 1000x to 100000x reserves.

No, it doesn't. I've done the maths here. At best, and with a better track record than Musk has actually demonstrated, if we use the USA as a metaphor for a the K2 civilisation Musk talks about with lunar-tiling factories making nothing but data centre satellites (done the maths on that too, that's what it would take and even then be borderline on thermodynamics grounds), Starship can be the Mayflower. Not even the Oregon Trail, certainly not the railroad network.

And fundamentally it isn't coherent to talk about "lower marginal price" when space mining has a TRL of 1 or 2. Might be cheap eventually, but pricing that in right now would be an error of judgment (aside from anything else, the tech to make it cheap may also make stuff here cheaper).

The only way this happens in my lifetime, and I'm younger than Musk, is if someone solves for von Neumann replicators. Which I won't rule out, but Musk hasn't demonstrated any special sauce for this to make me think he'd do it before anyone else.

Yeah, indeed, I was assuming in constant today-dollars. :)

Starship would be really good even if they can't make it reusable, but still hit the early-user price tags and capacity to LEO they're talking about for expendable-mode launches, even if they then stop improving.

But unless there's demand for launching a lot more stuff, that's not going to help them make a lot of money.

I can buy into a vision of several competing Starlink-like constellations. Can't buy into one about space-based data centres. And we need a lot more demonstrations of space colony precursor tech before I'm going to even have a strong opinion about the economics of space colonies*, either for or against: they're technically feasible, but so too is one on the sea floor, or the middle of Antarctica; and there's people who already build homes for themselves in the middle of the Sahara and at high altitude on mountains, but these aren't *huge* money-makers, just standard boring ones.

* they are cool though; if Musk had actually delivered on the Mars flights that were supposed to have already arrived two years ago, and also not turned out to be who he turned out to be, I'd have considered being an early Martian: https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/01/elon-musk-says-spacex-will...

> which is not the same thing as “in 10 years they will catch up."

This is reasonable, unless SpaceX is stagnating for a decade there will still be some gap in 10 years too.

> The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller

This is where the reasoning fails me. Unless you're making an unstated assumption about SpaceX or the competitors, why would the gap grow? As soon as there's a decent competitor, SpaceX's margins will get slashed. Their advancement will have to be supported by margins that can only shrink.

Followers can even have an easier time catching up because they have a working model in front of them. The leader has not only to execute but constantly innovate just to maintain a constant lead. The challengers "just" have to execute well because they can copy the leader's innovation until they catch up. And some of the competitors are more than willing and capable of extreme measures to copy.

Is there any field where over several decades the gap between the leader and the challengers just grew? It's not my industry but I have the personal impression that your "gap growing forever" opinion will age like milk left in the sun. We'll see.

> The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller.

Why? Logically it would seem that learning how to do something that's already been done would be easier than discovering it. SpaceX has already done a lot of the work and has shown the others that it's possible and how they do it. Why won't the others catch up? I can't think of any industry that has a market leader that only gets further away from their competition forever.

"The gap is getting larger year by year, not smaller."

You keep saying this—you'll have to explain. Very little in the world has ever worked like this—the opposite has generally been the case.