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by mikepurvis 1944 days ago
Sure, and legacy launch providers do business with the private sector also, but none of them could have been bootstrapped without years of unprofitable R&D on the public's dime.

There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."
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shazmosushi 1944 days ago
> There is no VC who would have accepted a pre-SpaceX pitch for low cost launches, Starlink, or any of the rest of it. It would have been straight up "lol Iridium amirite, get out."

SpaceX was funded by Elon Musk and later, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Peter Thiel's Founder's Fund. Starlink has been in part funded by a $1 billion investment from Google and Fidelity. And since then further funding rounds have been raised.

The DFJ and Founder's Fund investment was before SpaceX had any substantial NASA development contracts, let along their 2008 $1.6 billion launch contract.

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mikepurvis 1944 days ago
Interesting, though I don't know if any of that really disproves my point. Musk's own money was a self-investment; he didn't need to pitch anyone for that. Jurvetson was involved with Tesla prior, and Thiel was obviously connected through PayPal.

Until the Dragon demo flights in 2012-2013, I think SpaceX would have been hard pressed to raise significant capital from anyone other than Elon's friends. I think the fact that so many private space companies have one or more wealthy benefactors bears this out (Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Armadillo to a lesser extent).

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jjk166 1943 days ago
There's a wide gulf between "only a few people with the right skills and personal connections can bootstrap a space company" and "none of them could have been bootstrapped without years of unprofitable R&D on the public's dime"
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p_l 1940 days ago
The missing bits is that they bootstrapped after a lot of heavy lifting was done on public dime, and then landed a crucial bunch of govt contracts way before first succesful draco launch, the same kind of contracts that the previous private contractors also take.
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