[npunt]

Lost $250M using the advertised launch price of $67M for Falcon 9, which of course is way higher than what it actually costs SpaceX.

[pbmonster]

...and completely ignoring cost of lost hardware. Aren't those satellites several $100k a piece?

[Rebelgecko]

There's reason to be skeptical of that. I think their most recent profitable quarter (maybe their only profitable quarter?) was with a profit margin of ~3%.

Granted maybe there's some marginal benefits, eg launching n+1 rockets is cheaper per rocket than launching n rockets

[panick21_]

Not really questionable. They are building Starship, Starship infrastructure, new factories for Starlink, upgrading existing factories, designing new Starlink version, deploying Starlink ground infrastructure, selling Starlink terminals at negative mergin, at a are developing Raptor v3 and commissioning the factory for it. And of course most of those launches are for Starlink so they don't really produce profit.

And while they raised a lot of money, it isn't actually that much. If they had 0 or negative margin on launches the company wouldn't be nearly sustainable.

That they made any profit at all is a damn miracle.

> Granted maybe there's some marginal benefits, eg launching n+1 rockets is cheaper per rocket than launching n rockets

There very clearly is. Every launch company has talked about this. The fixed cost for infrastructure, boats, launch teams and so on is absolutely huge. That is why so many New Space companies bet their company on launching often.

At the same time SpaceX is now recovering fairing on almost all launches. Landings have been perfect. Development is done. And Fixed cost are distributed over a whole lot of launches. They can now fly the newer cores 15-20 times.

The Upper Stage is the biggest cost, people estimate it between 5-15M. And then 10-20M in fixed cost, labor and recovery hardware amortisation. I think it can't really be more then 35M, I would guess less.

[Nevermark]

SpaceX puts a lot money into research and development, and build out of infrastructure for future use.

So if the company is breaking even, then its manufacturing & launch business must have good margins.

Which means, self launched rockets cost SpaceX noticeably less than their commercial pricing.

[mavhc]

SpaceX posted a Q1 2023 profit of $55 million on $1.5 billion in revenue

And the spend about $2 billion on Starship per year.

So $6 billion in, $2 billion on Starship, $4 billion in other costs.

In 2022 they launched 61 times, which is $65 million per launch on average, they charge $67 million per launch.

They got $2 billion from NASA for 2022.

In 2022 they launched 3 crewed missions, 2 for NASA and 1 private.

[panick21_]

They don't charge for their own launches.

[mavhc]

They got $4 billion from Starlink users, that should cover it

[hnben]

when they spend a launch on their own stuff, they lose out on opportunity cost

[madarco]

no because there are not enough clients

[fooker]

The fuel costs about half a million.

Beyond that it's mostly people's times and materials they have stockpiled for economies of scale.

I would guess the lost satellites cost a bit more to manufacture that to launch in a reused Falcon 9.

[elihu]

Don't they waste the upper stage on Falcon 9 launches? (That being one of the reasons they want to transition to using Starship.)

[6nf]

The fairings alone add another million. The whole upper stage is not re-used at all.

[onethought]

They recover the fairings.

[m_mueller]

does it? why can they then sell it for not much more and run a profit?

[inemesitaffia]

Profit is price - cost