[somenameforme]

In investing it's critical to think about things probabilistically, rather than trying to just guess the future. "Fooled by Randomness" is a great book on this. In a scenario like this it's especially critical, because in the case where Starship fully delivers and the next great frontier of humanity opens up, the upside potentially is practically infinite.

E.g. imagine in a bet you think there's a 99% chance of something being worth $1 and a 1% chance of it being worth $1 million. What's a fair price? It's a simple calculation - 0.99 * 1 + 0.01 * 1,000,000 = ~$10,000. That's you setting a price of $10k on something that you fully expect to be worth $1 99% of the time, and still coming out just fine.

So the actual debate should not be on 'guess the future' but rather on the odds of Starship delivering and estimating the impact this would have. And I think to many the answers are fairly easy - 'very nonzero' and 'very big.' It's akin to the NVidia/Apple stories, except in this case it's being somewhat priced into the market to begin with because it's somewhat more probable, and easier to foresee.

[lokar]

The problem with that argument is the failure to reasonably factor in time. If you take an expected value approach (quite reasonable in general) looking into the future you need to discount for time or everything goes to infinity.

[somenameforme]

As ben_w also hit on the time aspect, I ended up responded to him and you simultaneously here. [1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48565321

[ben_w]

While the point is valid, the upside still isn't practically infinite; humans intuitively do something close to hyperbolic discounting for future returns (I assume evolution did this because of the possibility of black swans but it isn't talking).

The easy version of this is to value a company over the next 20 years of profits. The first half of that time horizon, I don't see much changing at all outside of Starlink subscribers. They've only got ~5 Mars launch windows in any given decade, and while their design philosophy is great for LEO where launch windows are daily, launching rockets to see what fails is exactly wrong for Mars.

OTOH, now to 2036, there's at least a chance AI goes boom. Perhaps even one of Musk's AI. Great for the overall economy (at least right up until it changes the economy so much that capitalism looks as obsolete as feudalism looks today, which may or may not be in that horizon), but even if it's the next industrial revolution, there's so much competition there that I expect everyone's profit margins to be almost nothing. And conversely, if any one of them does appear to be massively dominant, in comes an anti-trust case (who remembers Standard Oil?)

Same with rockets, though a "rocket boom" is perhaps an unfortunate phrasing. He finds a way to make more money than expected, just like he's already doing with Starlink? Great. Industrial espionage is a thing, and even if it wasn't, China's not got a problem with the state funding businesses to simply re-discover everyone else's secret sauce. US companies and residents may find themselves restricted from using the fruit of that work, but most of the world will just buy what's cheapest.

Still, as I said, your point is valid.

[somenameforme]

Starship has already made it to orbit multiple times. It's likely that it will be ready to go operational in well under a decade. As we're speaking of upside potential, let's just assume the aspirational goals are hit - and you end up seeing $10-$20/kg to space. You've just revolutionized not only space, but all transport on Earth as those prices are less than most terrestrial shipping options, and it can be delivered anywhere on Earth in a matter of minutes.

The implications of that are quite difficult to even fathom because again this is one of those things where I feel like we're trying to predict the economics of the internet before the first cable had been laid. But the one thing that can be very safely said is that the impact would be revolutionary.

And that is completely ignoring space when the whole point of Starship is being able to get 100+ tons to the Moon or Mars, which again revolutionizes those domains first in terms of size, but vastly more importantly - in terms of cost as well. This opens the door to viable private development on the Moon and Mars (to say nothing of space itself). And again the implications of this are very difficult to predict, but it would also certainly be revolutionary.

---

The competition issue you've brought is, in my opinion, one of the most viable concerns. If America can get stuff to orbit for $20/kg then it feels like China always finds a way to do it for $0.20/kg. But the reality is that SpaceX's secret sauce isn't all that secret. Their exact alloys, general construction specs, and more are all public knowledge. Many have tried, including with vast resources and wits behind them, and all have failed.

China is almost certainly going to be the #2 player and their Long March 9 [1] is their attempt to clone the Starship, but for now it's vaporware. And to actually get these things out onto the launch pad isn't the endgame, but just the beginning of the race. They are almost certainly years behind SpaceX, and the distance is likely increasing over time as SpaceX shows no signs of slowing down, and now has no funding constraints whatsoever.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_9

[ben_w]

> Starship has already made it to orbit multiple times. It's likely that it will be ready to go operational in well under a decade. As we're speaking of upside potential, let's just assume the aspirational goals are hit - and you end up seeing $10-$20/kg to space. You've just revolutionized not only space, but all transport on Earth as those prices are less than most terrestrial shipping options, and it can be delivered anywhere on Earth in a matter of minutes.

Let's assume it reaches $10/kg (I don't think it will, but let's assume that).

A 20ft shipping container can carry about 24 tons; the cost of shipping it to the other side of the world is much less than $240,000; the numbers I see vary depending on details, but even high numbers are less than $6k, which is $0.25/kg, and even then half of it is port-side not the ship's own cost. Air freight may get more competition, but not all shipping. And it won't replace a lot of trucks because it's too big (how many places want 10 container loads worth of goods at the same time?)

Yes, point-to-point 45 minute deliveries worldwide are going to have their uses, but price alone isn't revolutionary in that particular way.

Passenger flight would be something I can't rule out, but multi-gee launches will limit the numbers, the inherent noise issues will limit the launch locations.

I do agree with you that the implications will be difficult to guess correctly; however this is true in both directions, not just the positives, e.g. network hardware is vital to the internet, Cisco makes that, yet here's the history of Cisco stocks, with 25 years from the peak of the dot.com bubble to when it next reached the same price: https://www.google.com/finance/beta/quote/CSCO:NASDAQ?window...

> And that is completely ignoring space when the whole point of Starship is being able to get 100+ tons to the Moon or Mars, which again revolutionizes those domains first in terms of size, but vastly more importantly - in terms of cost as well. This opens the door to viable private development on the Moon and Mars (to say nothing of space itself). And again the implications of this are very difficult to predict, but it would also certainly be revolutionary.

Eventually, yes. But not soon enough for me to want to price it in today. Remember, hyperbolic discounting, black swans, competition, other things I can do with the money while I wait, all that means when I price it I want to know what it can do in the next 20 years at most. Even if I'm being optimistic about timelines, it would still take 20 years for the Moon to get enough industry for SpaceX to be worth the current market cap. (Well, unless someone makes a von Neumann replicator, but if that happens then whoever makes the replicator wins, regardless of if it was launched by SpaceX or not). Mars is harder.

> China is almost certainly going to be the #2 player and their Long March 9 [1] is their attempt to clone the Starship, but for now it's vaporware

Until they have enough confidence to put it into a circular orbit rather than one which has it hitting the Indian Ocean every time just in case something fails, the same can be said of actual Starship.

> They are almost certainly years behind SpaceX, and the distance is likely increasing over time as SpaceX shows no signs of slowing down, and now has no funding constraints whatsoever.

I assume China's behind, but with their secrecy (let alone the language barrier) it's hard to tell.

But SpaceX definitely has funding constraints. GAAP is says about $60bn obligations, but all-in they want to spend several hundred billion over the next few years and do not have enough revenue to cover it, so even with the IPO they are at actual risk of running out of money.

This is why the IPO happened at all: they ran out of private investors willing to give them money.

[somenameforme]

Most of your arguments have been perfectly reasonable, but trying to argue about the value of a shipping tanker vs point to point minutes time transport is not. We're speaking of viable same day delivery anywhere in the world, or same hour in some cases. Obvious complete replacements would be air freight, military logistics, and much more. For stuff you're fine taking months, sea shipping will likely remain favorable.

Cisco is more comparable to something like NVidia in modern times in that their valuations was driven by success during a time that was already screaming bubble, and an expectation for that bubble to somehow never pop. By contrast the space industry hasn't even really begun yet, so the wager on SpaceX is more speculative in one way, but also much more likely to be stable in another.

China isn't likely behind - they are definitely far behind. They can't even settle on a design for their Starship. And similarly, I think one thing SpaceX has proven is that fail fast is the way forward. You can't just sit in a sim and send these things up. There's too many unknown unknowns that you can only learn by watching things go boom, a lot. There is no world where China just unveils their secret Starship clone and starts flying successful missions with it. Again that's something everybody tries (in no small part because it sucks when things worth tens of millions of dollars go boom), and always fails with.

SpaceX has never had any trouble raising funds when desired. I think the main reason they IPO'd is as a black swan hedge. We're at a major inflection point on many levels, and it's very conceivable that in 10 years the US' role in the global economy will have been greatly reduced. Obviously that $3 trillion valuation is largely funny money, but for now that funny money still functions well enough. But that's likely liminal. It's entirely possible, if not likely, that we're currently Japan circa 1989.