[anovikov]

Well, at least success of SpaceX that was achieved in the industry that was considered a basket case overall, and unapproachable by private entrants in particular, is beyond doubt. He brought US space launch industry from a heavily struggling laggard progressively more dependent on Russians and quickly losing competence and capacity, to a complete world domination, all while consuming very little capital or engineering resources.

[Zigurd]

> all while consuming very little capital or engineering resources.

... If you ignore Starship. SpaceX is operating on a $20 billion bridge loan which, if the IPO struggles at all, adds to the risk. Starlink depends on becoming a telco scale mass market ISP, but it's operating in a shrinking TAM, squeezed by increasingly cheap terrestrial wireless infrastructure, and the fact that high income customers are a minority in areas rural enough for terrestrial wireless to be an uneconomical.

Tesla is spending more than the market cap of Rivian to become the Allbirds of the car industry. They're gonna blow their capex on robots and AI without refreshing the car line.

Another commenter remarked that Elon's fame is a failure of skepticism. I've been a skeptic for a few years now, starting with skepticism about agile rocket development, which sounded like bullshit to me.

[anovikov]

Well, Starship is going to add another order of magnitude to an already overwhelming domination (SpaceX launches 80+% of all payloads by weight, even corrected for orbital energy). This isn't cheap and it did a lot of things that seemed impossible or unlikely already.

There is no reason to say that its development is slow. Falcon 9 took 8 years from concept to first flight and another 8 years to high cadence, reliable reusable flights. Starship is now only 10 years in development and already went through several iterations.

[Zigurd]

Rocket companies aren't high value. The vast majority of Falcon 9 lunches are for Starlink. They're not bringing in outside money. There are lots of financial shenanigans in the capitalization of satellites with short lifespans, and hiding the football on Falcon 9 refurbishment costs. "Dominating" the launch of your own payloads makes AI circular market participants blush.

[anovikov]

Well, but at least it shows his engineering and management skills. Both US incumbents and Russians struggled to create new viable launch vehicles and Russians even lost capability to produce old ones (Zenit, then Proton). SpaceX seemed to have no problem doing it.

Falcon 9 refurbishment costs can't be high because whole thing takes under 2 weeks with less than a week spent in hangar for any refurbishment work... There may be no refurbishment at all on many flights, just some checks.

And yes, they ate entire worldwide commercial launch market and it wasn't enough... So there's Starlink. They appear to have no war around creating demand for themselves with their own payloads because others are not up to that task - there is too much rot and dysfunction everywhere in the space business worldwide except SpaceX, so they are kinda forced to vertically integrate.