[somenameforme]

The overwhelming majority of SpaceX holders are institutional. They had planned to allocate 30% to retail, but it ended up in the 20% range as a result of institutional demand. [1] No clue what's going on right now as their stock is going to the Moon. But in any case, I think the people that don't understand why it's doing well are mostly those who are unfamiliar with the space industry. SpaceX has already revolutionized space by dropping the cost to orbit by multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle, which it replaced. And it looks set to do that again with the Starship.

The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space. SpaceX brought that down to about $5000, and then further down to near $1400. That's a massive reduction in price, but you're still left with the problem that it costs $1400 to get a liter of water to space, which is why we still can't have nice things, yet.

Starship has the promise of bringing that down a couple of more orders of magnitude where the goal is to get it within the $10-$20 range. If they succeed, then you've just opened the doors to an entire new frontier of expansion and growth for humanity which is practically infinite. And right now there's no real reason to think that they won't succeed. And more importantly than this is that nobody seems to be able to compete on their level, or even remotely close. Their closest competitor is probably China who remains technologically well behind. And so SpaceX today is akin to being able to get a piece of some sort of super-ship making monopoly, just prior to the Age of Sail. The downside risk is basically zero since they're still making rapid progress - the only question is how rapid. And upside potential is basically infinite.

[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/spacex-cuts-retail-ipo-alloc...

[cjrp]

> The main reason humanity hasn't meaningfully started expanding into space is because it used to cost $54,000 to get a liter of water into space.

Am I naive in thinking that we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?

[ben_w]

> What's the benefit?

For why we'd want to go at all: there's a lot of resources up there, and pollution is much less of a concern for factories made up there. Also some material processes may be much easier in zero-gee.

But that doesn't mean it's actually worth the effort.

[ajmurmann]

Asteroid mining is the obvious one. That said as part of looking into SpaceX's business I learned that currently the TAM for launching other people's stuff into space is under $10 billion. SpaceX already owns most of that market. Their own focus on data centers in space IMO speaks for itself.

[chrissnell]

A hedge against civilization-destroying events. Meteors, global war, disease.

[phlakaton]

Space is not a hedge against these things. At best it's our final tomb.

There is no backup plan.

[petrocrat]

to be fair, in the pharoahs quest for immortality after death, if they could have put their pyramid burial tombs in space to avoid decay/ruin for longer they would have. I wouldn't be shocked to see the oligarchs paying for their own space burials inside very lavish satellites whose orbit won't decay for thousands of years so they can "live forever".

[andsoitis]

> we haven't expanded into space because we don't need to? What's the benefit?

Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning.

[lokar]

Which resources are cheaper to get from space? I’ve only ever seen hand waiving arguments, never any math.

[ben_w]

That depends entirely on the price; things are very different when it costs $20k/kg to orbit (basically nothing is worth that) vs. $20/kg to orbit.

Some people are suggesting making high quality fibre optics and pharmaceuticals in LEO already with Falcon prices:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Forge

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varda_Space_Industries

While I am *extremely* skeptical, I've heard people talk about space-based solar. I mention this only so nobody adds an "and also" for that.

Ditto anyone talking about lunar He-3. This is a bad idea, "why" is long enough to be worthy of a blog post.

But if you were committed to expansionism for whatever reason, then you'd want some way to get industrial quantities of steel from mines already in space, to make the factories themselves cheaper. Possibly megastructures like an orbital ring, too.

[somenameforme]

The hand waving is probably reasonable for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can't really math things out yet when costs are shifting by orders of magnitude on relatively short timeframes. What seems impossible in one year is a casual achievement in the next. If we go back to 2002 (when SpaceX was founded) and I told you that within 2 decades they'd have lowered the cost to get stuff to space by more than 97% relative to Space Shuttle, it'd have sounded somewhere between unreasonable and impossible, yet that is exactly what happened. And Starship is set to send prices plummeting yet again.

The second reason is that the notion of economics becomes kind of odd when you start introducing space. Space has practically infinite resources of every type imaginable. For instance one single asteroid, Psyche 16, is thought to have orders of magnitude more gold than has ever been extracted in human history. But I mean, what does this even mean economically? Obviously if you start bringing back hundreds of thousands of tons of gold, the price is going plummet. And even the viable possibility of this happening would probably send the price of gold plummeting. So... it's weird. We're in uncharted waters.

And then on top of this access to space will mean we will start expanding outward - colonies, vastly larger stations stations, and so on. And these expansions will develop their own parallel economies with their own needs/production/etc. This is all kind of like trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid.

[lokar]

Most people I see online freak out at the idea of normalizing living in an apartment/condo and slightly higher density. I don’t see them lining up to live in space :)

[somenameforme]

As far back as the 60s NASA had already laid out technical plans for how to get humans to Mars. The Moon was never meant to be the destination, but a brief stepping stone to greater things. So we can thank Nixon for setting humanity's progress back by half a century. The ISS and Space Shuttle both were driven largely by these initial plans.

But the current claustrophobic nature of the ISS was, again, not the destination. There was a grand scheme of in-orbit refueling, fuel depots, and much larger scale space architecture. Something of the ISS scale was intended as a short jumping-off point, a workers' tent analog. But our progress stalled out and the workers' tent is what we were left with.

The point I'm making here is that space in the era we're stepping into is very unlikely to look much like the one we're leaving. This is even more true as the price drops because private industry will be able to play a major role. There will be no Nixon to just cancel everything out of concerns for his political career.

[ben_w]

Depends on the timescale, and what other tech is the prerequisite to this and what other things can be done with that tech.

Even with cheap rockets, Musk was talking about 6-digit-dollars for becoming a Martian, I don't see more than a few million people wanting to spend that much for that outcome.

If we get self-replicating robots or whatever, big space stations aren't that expensive, but also Earth is huge and you can extract minerals from seawater electrolytically and PV is already cheap, so perhaps we'd just get a load of seasteads instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading

[petrocrat]

It's not about the "Access to resources. A sense of adventure. Learning."

Since you are right. All of these things are available on Earth for far cheaper, with better ROI and with far less risk of dying or getting early cancer from cosmic rays.

The real benefit is a commanding lead over geopolitical rivals in the domain of satellites and satellite platforms for hosting devices in orbit, thus securing an insurmountable national security advantage.

[CuriouslyC]

The only argument for space is because you're so set on capitalism that you'd rather destroy the earth than stop trying to continually grow profit. If you're that sick and deluded, then space gives you a way to escape the consequences of your own foolish hubris.

[CuriouslyC]

So, your argument for SpaceX is that they'll take physical systems that they've already tried to squeeze down, and squeeze them down nearly two orders of magnitude? What fundamental scientific discovery do you think is going to enable this? Or do you think that AI is magically going to do it for them?

[somenameforme]

That has nothing to do with how they have already reduced costs, and how they continue to do so. Before SpaceX, you launched a rocket to space once, and then you discarded it. Imagine how much a plane ticket would cost if each time a plane was flown once, it was then discarded.

The big revolution with SpaceX was meaningful reuse (I can get into the comparison with Space Shuttle if you're unfamiliar there). Landing and reusing rockets is something that Boeing et al thought was impossible from an economic point of view, and actually taunted SpaceX in their early years over it along the lines of 'Oh you're going for reuse. Yeah we researched and trialed that out a decade ago. The economics don't work. Cute to see you trying though.'

Their success there is what helped bring the costs way down. But there's still plenty that's not reused - in particular they currently only reuse the first stage (the big rocket that gets things off the ground initially) while discarding the second stage - the space-optimized payload delivery rocket. With Starship they're going for 100% rapid reuse. So you're looking at this absolutely massive 2 stage system where both parts will be able to be repeatedly and rapidly reused.

[threetonesun]

You really think cost is the main reason humanity hasn't expanded into space? I'm all for space exploration and learning from space but actual humans are quite squishy, like gravity, dislike radiation, and would need to take a lot of water with them just to visit a rock very indifferent to their existence.

[somenameforme]

Definitely. Humans expand. It's probably an evolutionary imperative in many of us. Africa was essentially an oasis and yet some of us decided to go make our way outward to inhospitable freezing ass places where the environment itself is just constantly trying to kill you in a million different ways. And we knew nothing about how to deal with it, at first.

Or take the early sea voyages. Not only were there endless worries about things that were ultimately nonissues like sea monsters or falling off the edges of the Earth, but there were endless very real dangers awaiting which we had no clue about or how to deal with - scurvy, rogue waves, and much more. In the aforementioned Age of Sail, it was just expected that a significant chunk of your crew would die. Yet somehow we pushed onward and outward.

And the infinite possibilities of space are going to absolutely dwarf all previous frontiers in terms of interest and potential.

[threetonesun]

You're much more optimistic about the concept of infinity than I am!

[somenameforme]

You mean in terms of us creating a system of gods and serfs?